Union College

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002... Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office. Before he became President, Carter served as a U.S. Naval officer, was a peanut farmer, served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one as Governor of Georgia . During Carter's term as President, two new cabinet-level departments were created: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks , and returned the Panama Canal Zone to Panama. Throughout his career, Carter strongly emphasized human rights. He took office during a period of international stagflation, which persisted throughout his term.
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Alfred Sommer is a prominent American ophthalmologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research on... vitamin A in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that dosing severely vitamin A deficient children with an inexpensive, large dose vitamin A capsule twice a year reduces child mortality by as much as 34 percent. The World Bank and, recently, the Copenhagen Consensus list vitamin A supplementation as one of the most cost-effective health interventions in the world. Sommer was born in 1942 in New York City and graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York in 1963. Sommer has an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MHS from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health . He is professor of Epidemiology and International Health at the Bloomberg School and Professor of Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1990-2005, where he was instrumental in raising funding for an unprecedented expansion of the School's research and size.
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Phil Alden Robinson is an American film director and screenwriter whose films include Field of Dreams, Sneakers and The Sum of All Fears. Robinson... was born in Long Beach, New York, the son of Jessie Frances and S. Jesse Robinson, who was a drama critic for the New York Journal American and a media coordinator for the liquor division of the National Distillers & Chemical Corp. in New York. Robinson graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Union College in 1996. Robinson directed the baseball film, Field of Dreams . It earned Robinson nominations for the Directors Guild of America Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation . Other accolades for the film include the Christopher Award, and Premiere Magazine's Readers Poll for Best Picture of 1989. His next feature, Sneakers , was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
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Andrea Barrett is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. She... received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, and her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Barrett was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown until the publication of Ship Fever, a collection of novella and short stories that won the National Book Award in 1996. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Her work reflects her lifelong interest in science, and women in science. Many of her characters are scientists, often 19th-century biologists. Barrett teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina. She was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts.
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