Passings

Donald Musa, whose more than 40-year Pitt career included a decade as director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR), died Sept. 8, 2023.

Musa began his career at Pitt in 1978 as a research specialist and programmer/analyst for the Department of Industrial Engineering in the School of Engineering. After a decade, he joined UCSUR as a senior research associate/research specialist, becoming its QDAP director in 2008.

According to a remembrance from his department, Musa “was instrumental in QDAP, taking the lead on completely restructuring how the qualitative/open-ended student responses for Pitt’s Leavers/Student Retention interviews were coded and analyzed, the applications of which are still in place to this day.”

His research, often involving multiple Pitt schools, included developing, conducting and analyzing surveys on vaccine uptake and hesitancy, racial differences, equity issues and health, trust in medical research and self-care during chronic illness. He was published in leading peer-reviewed journals and was co-investigator or analyst on several grants.

In addition to his work at UCSUR, he was an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences at what was then the Graduate School of Public Health (2000-2013), teaching survey research methods. When he retired from Pitt in 2017, he took on a part-time role as senior analyst at UCSUR, working on several projects until shortly before his death.

Musa earned his master’s degree in sociology at Pitt in 1977 and his doctorate in public health in 2005. His career began as a research assistant at Penn State (1969-1972) and then as a researcher for Westinghouse Electric Corp. (1972-1977).

Rich Schulz, UCSUR director during the majority of Musa’s tenure there, recalled: “First and foremost, Don was an extraordinary human being who was universally liked and respected by his colleagues at the center and the University community more widely. He was kind, helpful and respectful toward people he interacted with and thoughtful and sophisticated in his scientific work. He published major papers on health disparities with more than a dozen faculty at the University, including me, and was a major architect and advocate of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program of UCSUR, a widely used resource for faculty throughout the University. He was one of those individuals who measurably improved the quality of life of those around him.”

Scott Beach, director of survey research for UCSUR, became Musa’s colleague and sometime collaborator beginning in 1993. For two decades they worked together on the provost’s office retention surveys, as well as other large-scale surveys of older adults and the state of aging. Beach was also a co-teacher with Musa on the Public Health survey methods class (2000-2009).

“Don was thoughtful and humble,” Beach recalled. “He was a really great scholar and very detail-oriented.”

After decades of friendship, Beach could only remember a few disagreements, and always over their working style, where Musa was slower and more deliberate. “But it was in the spirit of getting the work done,” Beach says. “He was quiet and unassuming — just a good colleague.”

Some of Musa’s most impactful work was in the QDAP program, Beach adds, studying the use of focus groups and in-depth interviewing, as well as in restructuring the way open-ended responses to survey questions were coded and analyzed.

Musa is survived by his brother, Gerald (Diane) Musa, and nephew Eric Musa. Memorial gifts are suggested to the American Cancer Society.

— Marty Levine

Ed Ochester — long-time chair of the English department’s writing program, editor of the Pitt Poetry Series at the University of Pittsburgh Press (establishing its Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) and author of more than a dozen poetry collections — died Aug. 22, 2023, at 83.

“He broke open American poetry” to new and diverse voices, said colleague and his successor as writing program chair, Lynn Emanuel, now professor emerita. “He broke open the kind of influence that a poetry series could have.”

“He was just a legend in publishing and editing,” said Jeff Oaks, whom Ochester hired at Pitt and who is now a teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in the writing program. “He had this wild and eclectic sense of the possibilities of poetry.”

“It's hard to overestimate Ed's influence in any number of areas,” Emanuel said, “not only in the way he ran the poetry series but in the department. He was … a free spirit, even a rebellious spirit. He was courageous and championed projects that weren't even popular in the department or at the dean's level,” such as creating a reading series with some of the department’s budget rather than hiring a new faculty member. “We had this burgeoning writing program and no visiting writers,” she recalled.

He helped to bring national recognition to writing programs, Emanuel said, placing them on the same plain as composition and literature programs as the president, for two consecutive terms, of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs: “At that time it was a new and growing and novel idea to have an MLA (Modern Language Association) convention, but for writers, and Ed was at major influence in that organization.

“The poetry series had a number of very terrific editors,” Emanuel added, “but (previously) the poetry series hewed pretty closely to a kind of national aesthetic. Poetry was really white and male. When Ed took over, all of that was changed. The complexion of contemporary poetry being published by a smaller press just changed.”

In his department, she said, “Everybody thought he was a marvelous teacher and I would get glowing reports about his teaching. The students adored him. His teaching was informed by a deep background in literature but he was also very approachable. Ed was in no way a snob about anything. He had strong likes and dislikes. But he was never the master standing at the front of the classroom. He was at the table sitting with his students talking about their poetry. He was terrific at giving criticism that wasn't cruel or snobbish.”

Oaks, on whose MFA thesis committee Ochester served, agreed: “Because he was an editor, he line-edited, and that was one of the most useful things to sit and watch him do. The thing that I found most wonderful about him and what I learned from him was how to spot a line that wasn't necessary.”

He recalled being “tricked” into learning to write poetry in a different manner: “I remember our workshop — he actually told us to bring in two poems a week. I started falling behind and started writing a different kind of poetry just to make the assignment. He taught us not to put too much pressure on the poems, to trust ourselves. He liked poems that try to move toward the plainspoken, that didn't have too much poetic decoration on them — not getting the poem to be too tragic, to be too intellectual. And he really liked humor; if you could get him to laugh in a poem, you knew you really got to him.”

Later, as a colleague, Oaks said, Ochester “really defended the writing program. There was a lot of tension about what it meant to be a writer, what writers needed to study.”

Oaks added: “So many of the books I learned my poetry from came from the University of Pittsburgh Press,” to which Ochester brought poets of color, LGBT poets and working class poets. “He really championed people across the long haul of careers.”

Born on Sept. 15, 1939, in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, Ochester earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell in 1961, where he was the editor of the campus humor magazine, The Cornell Widow. He received his masters from Harvard and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

He began his academic career on the faculty of the University of Florida in 1967, joining Pitt in 1970. He was editor of the Pitt Poetry Series from 1978 to 2021, publishing hundreds of collections that won or were finalists for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which launched the careers of many diverse American poets.

Alongside creating the Starrett prize in 1981, he served as editor of the Pitt Press’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize and cofounded the poetry journal 5AM.

Ochester published more than a dozen poetry collections, including “Sugar Run Road,” “Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New,” “The Land of Cockaigne,” “Cooking in Key West” and “Changing the Name to Ochester.” His work earned grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.

He also was the recipient of the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006 and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award in 2001. Following his retirement from Pitt, he was on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars.

“He did so much and he was really humble about it,” Oaks said. “His own poems are so lovely and underrated too. He probably wouldn't even say that. He was just a good heart in the Pittsburgh community.”

“I think about him with great tenderness,” Emanuel said. “He was a very good man and he was a very smart man and he was devoted to poetry when at the beginning very few editors were. He was very special.”

He is survived by his children, Ned and Betsy (Mike Sauter) of Pittsburgh, and a granddaughter, Quincy Sauter.

Memorial gifts are suggested to WYEP.org or the local animal shelter Four-Footed Friends. A celebration of his life and poetry will be announced at a later date.

— Marty Levine

H.J. “Jerry” Zoffer, the 28-year dean of the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration under whose “remarkable leadership the school advanced dramatically in terms of quality, impact and reputation,” as current Dean Eugene Anderson memorialized him, died July 22, 2023, at 92.

“Jerry Zoffer was a giant among academic deans,” Anderson remarked to the University Times. “The Pitt Business community is deeply indebted to him for his vision and leadership, and his outstanding contributions to the growth of our faculty and programs. … He is an inspiration to us all and it is from his shoulders that we look forward to a promising future.”

Zoffer was dean from 1968 to 1996 and a faculty member for 67 years until 2020, directing Katz to become a top business school. He led the re-establishment of Pitt’s undergraduate business program, the construction of Mervis Hall, the institution of the part-time MBA and Executive MBA programs and the establishment of several new dual degree programs with other Pitt schools and colleges.

He also undertook a new partnership in Budapest for the school in the 1980s that led to the school’s Executive MBA Worldwide program. Pitt established the H.J. Zoffer Chair in Leadership and Ethics in 2016 to honor Zoffer’s many contributions during his career.

While at Pitt, he also served as president of the American Association of University Administrators and the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. He was on the boards of numerous business and community organizations. Among his many awards, in 1986 he was selected as man of the year in education by Vectors-Pittsburgh. He was also the author of many articles as well as books on individual and group decision-making under risk, the social responsibility of business, continuing education for managers, business ethics, corporate risk analysis, accounting education and improving institutional credibility.

In the memorial message on the Pitt Business website, Arjang Assad, dean of the school from 2015-22, said: “Jerry built one of the world’s strongest and most influential faculty groups in business ethics and corporate social responsibility. In the process, he put Pitt Business on the international map, taking us from a regionally recognized institution to one with global acclaim.”

Added Vicky Hoffman, business administration faculty member: “Jerry was a visionary leader who implemented initiatives we still value today. For example, Jerry was one of the first to actively recruit to Pitt’s MBA program Black students in the late 1960s and women in the early 1970s. He was instrumental in implementing the flagship one-year MBA program that had over 300 students in its heyday and was the force behind re-starting Pitt’s undergraduate College of Business Administration in the mid-1990s. After 28 years as dean, Jerry made the unusual move of going back to teaching, which he approached with the energy and enthusiasm he brought to everything he did.”

“The one word to describe Jerry Zoffer is indomitable,” recalled Carrie Leana, another of Zoffer’s Katz faculty colleagues. “He cared passionately about the Katz School and the University of Pittsburgh, and fought vigorously for its success, but always with that infectious grin and a twinkle in his eye. One just couldn’t say no to Jerry!”

Pre-deceased by his wife, Maye Rattner Zoffer, he is survived by his children Gayle (David MacNaughton) and Bill (Caryn Zimmerman); his brother Joseph; his grandchildren Josh, Emily, and Mollie; his long-time partner Sorel Berman; and many nieces, nephews and cousins.

Memorial contributions are suggested to the University of Pittsburgh General Scholarship Fund or to Temple Sinai of Pittsburgh.

— Marty Levine

Emeritus Professor of History Janelle Greenberg, well-known for her highly valued undergraduate teaching and highly readable research into the origins of early modern British thinking, died June 6, 2023.

“She was just a tremendous teacher and a really talented researcher as well,” recalled George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History, who noted Greenberg’s rare distinction of moving from part-time to full-time in the department, and becoming only the department’s second female full professor.

Greenberg was honored with one of the first Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Awards in 1989.

“She was able to take these pretty dry topics and get students engrossed in them in the classroom,” he said, adding that her research into the origins of British Constitutionalism uncovered the Medieval roots of British thinking about how to give subjects powers to protect themselves from over-reaching by the monarchy.

He recalled substituting in Greenberg’s classroom at times when she had to attend a conference, and presenting a lecture she had prepared. He would pause to ask students about certain terms in the lecture, and witnessed the enthusiastic debates this engendered. 

“It was some of the most lovely class discussion I had ever led on something I knew nothing about,” he said.

Andrews was chair when Greenberg came up for promotion and knew he’d also need to read her latest book, which was “The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought.” “I could see this was exactly what she was doing in her classes,” he observed — explaining very complicated history in engaging ways.

Greenberg taught in the department for more than 40 years, and Professor Emeritus William Chase was her colleague and friend for the last 39 of them. “She had a really good sense of humor and a deep sense of humanity,” he said. “She was less impressed by the number of articles and books the person could publish than their quality as a colleague. How do you treat students and treat fellow faculty members? Those things were very important to Janelle.

“I learned a lot from watching her, the way she reacted to students and treated them,” he added.

Liann Tsoukas became a colleague in 2000. “She instantly reached out to me and served immediately in the department both as a role model and a mentor. She didn’t have an ounce of pretension or superiority. That’s just not how she carried herself.

“She always graded her own material. She just humanized the classroom for undergraduates. She was very perceptive about how people learn and how people live their lives. That definitely was a model for me.

“She had this great whimsical sense of humor,” Tsoukas continued. “She would say, ‘Sometimes if I feel like I am losing the students I will tell a wacky story about the past.’ Those students felt seen and heard and known in her classrooms.

Twenty-year departmental colleague Bruce Venarde recalled Greenberg as “a force of nature, but unlike many forces of nature she was a lot of fun to be with, because she was hilarious. She was just extraordinary: an outstanding historian, an outstanding and at this time just legendary teacher and an outstanding colleague.

“She was a wonderful mentor to me when I entered the department, in fact throughout my time at Pitt, and a very generous mentor to other new arrivals in the department.”

He recalled her generosity to the office staff, whom she invited to lunch every month or two. Grace Tomcho, the office’s administrator for 35 years, now retired, remembered those occasions well. When asked if she were coming along to those staff lunches, Greenberg would say, “No, no, I just want you girls to go to lunch and you talk about all of us,” Tomcho said.

“She was very caring,” Tomcho added. “She was a bright light in the department. She always watched over the staff. If anyone gave the staff any type of problems, she was there. She always came in with a smile and always asked how we were doing.”

Janelle Greenberg was born on April 3, 1938 in Muskogee, Okla. She graduated from Stillwater High School as a music major in 1956. She attended the University of Houston on a band scholarship but eventually turned to the study of history, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1960. She then completed her master’s thesis in English history in 1963 under Corinne Weston, later her co-author for “Subjects and Sovereigns” from Cambridge University Press. Greenberg earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 1970.

She joined Pitt as a part-time lecturer in 1973 and was promoted to part-time assistant professor (1978-1989), gaining full-time status and tenure and then becoming a full professor in 2001.

Greenberg served as a thesis advisor for many students in history and in the Honors College. In a video on Pitt’s YouTube channel about Greenberg’s teaching, she says: “It’s so invigorating, it’s so exciting, teaching these people this stuff that is going to make them, I honestly believe, better human beings and certainly better citizens, better able to participate in our democracy, and I love that — I just love it.”

She is survived by her husband of 62 years, Martin; three children, Joshua, Rebecca and Steven (Beth); three grandchildren, Arella, Ezra and Pearl; a brother, David (Jenny); a sister, Nancy (Breck); a brother-in-law, Howard; nieces Joyce and Lisa, and other relatives.

— Marty Levine

Catherine “Katie” Elizabeth Pope, inaugural associate vice chancellor for strategic operations and planning in the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and its first full-time Title IX coordinator, died May 23 at 49.

“She was an amazing colleague, incredibly resourceful and dependable,” said Clyde Wilson Pickett, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion. “She reached out and offered contacts and assistance” when Pickett arrived at Pitt in 2020, he recalled. “She was just a committed professional.”

A departmental remembrance noted her rise to associate vice chancellor for civil rights and Title IX in October 2019 before attaining her final title last year.

“Katie helped forge the very foundation of the University of Pittsburgh’s Title IX efforts,” Chancellor Patrick Gallagher said. “Today, we are a better University and a better community because of her steadfast leadership, inspiring example and unyielding quest to do the right thing at each and every turn.”

Kathy Humphrey, former senior vice chancellor for engagement, said of Pope, “All who knew her were struck by her commitment to her work, her keen strategic mind and her empathetic soul,” while former OEDI head Pamela Connelly recalled that “Katie Pope was one of the most intelligent, strong and empathetic individuals I have ever known. She embodied the values of equity, diversity and inclusion not just during her workdays at the Pitt campuses, but after hours, seven days a week, all-year round. She spent decades fighting to affect change in our culture surrounding sexual misconduct.”

Born in Ohio, Pope earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Dayton (1996) and a master’s degree in philanthropic studies at Indiana University (1999), as well as a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies at Iowa State University (2005). She had been pursuing a doctorate from Pitt’s School of Education at the time of her death.

Her early career encompassed work as executive director of the Assault Care Center Extending Shelter & Support and the YMCA, both in Ames, Iowa, and at a women’s shelter in New York City .

Her career in higher education included Title IX coordinator for Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and at Washington University in St. Louis, where she was development director for the School of Architecture. She worked next in educational programming and outreach for Iowa State and then was named director of Purdue University’s Women’s Resource Office (2006).

She then assisted in its merger into that university’s Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence, where she was named its managing director. There, Pope supported programming and outreach across Purdue for women, underrepresented minorities, those from indigenous nations and people with disabilities.

After coming to Pitt in 2015, Pope expanded her department’s outreach and programming, helping to formulate its mission and hire essential personnel.

Speaking from his office, Pickett noted Pope’s work putting together the University’s Title IX civil rights team; her efforts with Carrie Benson, senior manager for prevention and education in the Title IX Office, on the department's sexual misconduct prevention efforts, where Pope was “definitely a champion for this work”; and her crucial participation in the committee organizing and running Pitt’s annual diversity forum.

“She understood the importance of being involved in the community,” Pickett added. “All of our community engagement pieces she was directly involved with, most recently working to put together an ambassadors program to match our employees with community members” — a program the department intends to continue developing. This past year Pope was focused on bringing about the department’s community awards program.

She was, overall, “personable and authentic,” he said. “We have heard overwhelmingly from colleagues who expressed their appreciation for having a chance to work with her.”

Pope is survived by her husband, Bill Kannel; daughters, Ellie and Erinn; parents, Betsy and Ed Pope; in-laws Ed and Margie Kannel and their children; and many loving aunts, uncles and cousins and extended family and friends.

A memorial service for friends and family is being planned and will be announced.

Memorial gifts are suggested to support colon cancer prevention and research or to a GoFundMe account in support of the education of her daughters.

— Marty Levine

Martica “Tica” Hall, a leading expert on sleep and circadian science as professor of psychiatry, psychology, and clinical and translational science in the School of Medicine, died March 18, 2023.

Daniel Buysse recalls meeting Hall when she was a graduate student here in 1994. She later became his colleague and long-time collaborator, co-directing psychiatry’s training program in sleep medicine, working as co-investigators on numerous other grants and co-authoring more than 125 papers.

“She essentially lived in the lab for her dissertation study, which still stands as one of the best examples of experimental stress effects on sleep,” said Buysse (distinguished professor of psychiatry, clinical and translational science, and medicine and UPMC Endowed Chair in Sleep Medicine) at Hall’s recent memorial service. He highlighted her elections as president of both the American Psychosomatic Society and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and her service on the Sleep Research Society’s board of directors.

“In these roles, Tica did what she loved: Planned and executed scientific meetings that brought together investigators from diverse disciplines — stress, sleep, circadian rhythms, health, disparities. Tica paid attention to what was happening in science, identified where the gaps were, and built bridges between people to make that science better. She is widely credited in each of these organizations with bringing sleep to behavioral medicine and vice versa. And at every step of the way, Tica found ways to support trainees.”

Interactions with Hall “encouraged her younger colleagues and shared her astonishment and fascination with science,” Buysse said.

During the past seven years, Hall and Buysse ran a weekly seminar for sleep and circadian science trainees at the University. Hall also established the Sleep and Circadian Workshop in Indispensable Methods to offer a brief training course to underrepresented trainees and those from institutions with fewer resources.

After joining Pitt’s faculty in psychiatry in 1998, she published more than 230 peer-reviewed papers and 15 invited publications, and presented dozens of invited, keynote and distinguished scientist talks locally, nationally and internationally. She received more than 40 funded grants and mentored about 75 trainees.

Psychiatry department chair David A. Lewis recalls Hall as “a superb scientist, dedicated mentor and excellent teacher.” He met Hall when, as a post-doc, she took his class on translational neuroscience. “She was passionate then about promoting and provoking the best discussions among the members of the class, and she carried that same enthusiasm into her many years of outstanding service and contributions to our department. Her accomplishments as a scientist and teacher were appropriately recognized by the highest honors in her field. She was a consummate colleague to those who had the opportunity to work with her.

Psychiatry colleague Beatriz Luna remembers speaking with Hall at 9 a.m. some days and being told, “Oh yeah, I just got home,” as Hall had been working all night on a paper, a grant, or a mentoring plan for students. Luna describes Hall as “passionate and never, ever giving up. Tica was just inherently driven to help everyone around her: ‘No, we’re going to make this happen.’ She led not only her own grant but big, collaborative program grants that really led the science into new areas.” Hall, she said, was “just a really remarkable individual who stood above most of the people you know, not just for her brilliance, but for her caring nature.”

Born in San Tomé, Venezuela, Hall earned a bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of Memphis in 1989 and a master of science   in medical psychology from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. in 1993. She was awarded her Ph.D. from Pitt in biopsychology two years later.

She received her second appointment at Pitt, in psychology, in 2005, and then in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute in 2007. She became director of the data management core in Medicine’s Sleep and Chronobiology Center in 2012, co-director of the Translational Research Training in Sleep and Circadian Science in 2014 and co-director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Science in 2016.

“Hall’s research incorporated both behavioral medicine and sleep medicine, and she was a leading force in the integration of these two fields,” her department noted in a tribute. “She introduced sleep and circadian rhythms as mechanisms and moderators of health in their own right, as well as in combination with other behavioral factors, and conducted pioneering work examining heart rate variability during both sleep and wakefulness. For many years, sleep medicine focused on disorders (such as sleep apnea) in relation to disease risk, but Dr. Hall’s work contributed to the recognition that other characteristics of sleep (such as duration and timing) could play a comparably important role in health outcomes. Her most recent research included a National Institute on Aging grant examining whether disturbed sleep, as measured by poor multidimensional sleep health, augments the effects of depression on biological aging.”

She was honored with the American Psychosomatic Society Distinguished Scientist Award in 2022, and the society presented her its first annual Martica Hall Award in Sleep Medicine. She was chair of the National Institutes of Health’s Biobehavioral Mechanisms of Emotion, Stress and Health study section and of its Mechanisms and Consequences of Sleep Disparities study section, and of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Center for Scientific Review Special Emphasis Panel.

She also received many mentorship awards including the Academy of Behavioral Medicine’s Research Mentor Award, the Sleep Research Society’s Mary A. Carskadon Outstanding Educator Award and the Department of Psychiatry’s Outstanding Mentor Award.

“She was one of the very few people who was a member of the graduate faculty of the psychology department,” recalls Hall’s colleague Meryl Butters, “because she cared so deeply about educating Pitt graduate students in psychology. It’s an honor. She was very proud of it. She was fully invested in Pitt as a research university, beyond the medical school.

“Anything she took on she made sure that she finished one-hundred percent, much more than the average person.”

That included Hall’s diagnosis of breast cancer, Butters said. Hall joined a then-new local group of breast cancer “thrivers and survivors,” 412Thrive, in 2020. “These women looked up to her and how she was handling her illness and continuing her profession and she became a mentor to some of the younger women in the group.”

“She considered living with cancer part of ‘her journey’ and not a battle to fight,” Butters recalled at Hall’s memorial. “She lived her life with what I can only describe as gusto, and … she was always a deeply compassionate mentor, colleague and friend. She had exceedingly high standards for each of her personal undertakings, and she only knew one way to live, which was ‘all in.’ This meant that when anyone in her sphere was challenged or distressed, she was truly there for them, as both a cheerleader and renderer of all manner of aid, as needed. In keeping with her enduring approach to life, she always did ‘whatever it took.’”

She is survived by her husband Ken and her son Gabriel.

Memorial contributions are suggested to 412Thrive, 44 Woody Crest Drive, Pittsburgh PA 15234.

— Marty Levine

David C. Wood, emeritus associate professor of neuroscience — a founding member of the department and creator of the Neuroscience Learning Lab Fund — died March 10, 2023, at 86.

Wood joined the Pitt faculty in 1969 and was among four professors recruited from psychology to form what was then the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience.

“He was one of the key members of the department,” said Stephen D. Meriney, professor and department chair.

Wood taught an important introductory course in neuroscience for undergraduates, Meriney noted: “He was a really great teacher. He was someone who was very passionate about the mechanisms behind what occurs in the nervous system. That is very technically challenging. He took a very hands-on approach. He did a lot of demonstrations and worked with the students more one on one and I think that was appreciated.”

Wood’s research focused on learning in simple pond-dwelling organisms called stentors. He studied their behavior at the molecular level of habituation (adaptation after repeated exposure to stimuli) as a foundation for understanding that process in higher animals.

Wood remained very active in teaching in later years, well past his official retirement in 2007. “His legacy was solidified when, after his retirement, he decided to donate a large sum of money to the department for the purpose of developing a teaching laboratory,” Meriney said. The department had never had a lab for teaching the basics of neuron function, and Wood also also wanted to create an opportunity for a new teaching faculty member, concentrating on the neurobiology of learning, centering around invertebrate animals.

Meriney joined the faculty in 1993 and counts Wood as a mentor: “He was a very supportive senior faculty member. He was always helping faculty get started and solve problems,” including loaning them his equipment and supplies. “He was a very interactive, friendly and supportive colleague.”

Born May 21, 1936, in Buffalo, N.Y., Wood attended Nichols School in Buffalo, Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of Michigan, where he earned his doctorate in psychology in 1968.

His first faculty position was at Yale, but shortly afterward he joined the psychobiology faculty at Pitt. 

He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Diana Marston Wood; son Sargent Wood (Bonnie Chen), daughter Cynthia Henshaw (John Henshaw) and three grandchildren, Annemarie Wood and Gabriella and Nathaniel Henshaw.

A memorial service is being planned for the summer.

— Marty Levine

Physical Therapy Professor Emeritus George Carvell, recently retired after a 47-year career as a faculty member in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and its first National Science Foundation-funded researcher, has died.

When Dean Anthony Delitto joined the school’s physical therapy faculty in 1991, Carvell had already been an important presence in the school since 1975 — including for his research, some in collaboration with Pitt faculty member Daniel Simons, on neuronal integration in the neocortex, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“He represented in my mind the true academic person,” Delitto recalls. “He was not only a great teacher but an accomplished scientist. He was the pacesetter then. You don’t get funded by the NSF if the work is not very innovative.”

When Carvell instituted important changes to the neuroscience course he was teaching, Delitto was department chair. “It was a choice of either reducing the rigor or finding a better way to teach it and he chose the latter,” he says of Carvell, who created an extensive online learning module to help students through the class materials. “At the time it was quite innovative.”

Carvell was known in the department for taking advances in basic science and adapting it to what PT students do every day. “The more mature the student, the more they appreciated his approach to teaching and his sense of humor,” Delitto says. To undergraduates and graduate students alike, “he was just a wonderful mentor, but you had to come to the table wanting to work. For those willing to come to the table and do the work, they all spoke very highly of him.”

Delitto recalls their mutual early hours in the school, and Carvell’s frank, straightforward talk: “I really admired his candidness. He was a very humble guy in a lot of ways. He was a big part of the school and a big part of its foundation.”

Carvell was still teaching in his retirement – full courses, up to the last.

As Daniel Simons, now a retired professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology, wrote in a remembrance. “George was deeply committed to furthering the scientific basis of clinical practice in physical therapy. This forward-looking view drove his passion for teaching and science. George had a questioning intellect, an artist’s eye and an irrepressible if somewhat quirky sense of humor. My informal polling of several decades of Pitt PT graduates suggests that few if any of the many hundreds of his students have forgotten his intellectually rigorous lectures, each delivered with a healthy dose of dad jokes. George brought these same gifts to the laboratory bench. He was a creative and accomplished scientist as well as an outstanding and supportive role model for undergraduate and postgraduate trainees in our laboratory. Everyone, including myself, benefited from George’s knowledge, dedication, and timely wit.”

Carvell earned an bachelor’s degree in biology from Gettysburg College (1967), physical therapy certification from the University of Pennsylvania (1971), a master’s degree in medical science from Emory University (1976) and Ph.D. from Pitt (1986).

He began his career as a high-school science teacher in 1967 but found it dissatisfying, soon joining Pitt as an instructor. By the next year, he was an assistant professor and by 1984 the PT program’s acting director, serving also as acting department chair in 1990. He was the school’s associate dean of graduate studies (1993-2011), in the midst of which he gained the rank of professor (1998). He also served on many school committees.

His extensive list of research publications includes several academic book chapters. When he retired in 2022, he published “Gray Matter On My Mind: Brains Wired For Survival and Success: Neuroscience For Rehabilitation Professions,” which had taken 23 years to complete, through Creative Commons as an Open Access eBook.

Memorial gifts are suggested to Pitt’s Department of Physical Therapy.

— Marty Levine

Chemical Engineering Emeritus Professor Shiao-Hung Chiang — whose influential work on clean coal processes led to their wide use and several patents, and who directed the Pittsburgh Coal Conference for decades (1973-1999) — died Dec. 14, 2022, at 94.

“He certainly brought notoriety to the school through his research work, and he was certainly very well known not only throughout the school but the entire University,” said former departmental colleague George Klinzing, now an emeritus instructor. “He had the highest respect as a faculty member in the school. He always stood for the highest standards in the academic field.”

Klinzing assisted with Chiang’s most prominent grant-supported study on the LICADO coal-cleaning process, which uses liquid carbon dioxide as the agent. Chiang led the basic and applied research, which included building a pilot plant unit to prove the principle.

In his large, funded projects involving coal beneficiation — the filtration of fine coal — Chiang had Ph.D. and M.S. candidates, undergraduates and even high-school students in his laboratory, Klinzing said. “He had lots of good advice for everybody — not only me but the technicians. He was a senior counselor to all the junior faculty.”

Chiang was interim chair of his department for two years, traveled extensively to technical meetings all over the world and produced many scientific publications. In his work, he teamed not only with other faculty but also with government employees and those in industry concerning energy, coal and mass transfer basics.

He was active in the American Filtration Society and an officer in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and received an honorary degree from Wuhan University in China.

As executive chair of the Pittsburgh Coal Conference — a forum for exchange of technical information and policy issues among industry, government and academic participants — he worked to internationalize it by bringing the gathering to other countries.

Shiao-Hung Chiang was born in Suzhou, China, earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the National Taiwan University (1952), his master’s degree at Kansas State (1955) and his Ph.D. at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) (1958), working there with Professor Herb Toor on basic mass transfer.

After being employed for several years at the Linde Corporation in Buffalo, N.Y., Chiang joined the Pitt faculty in 1960 and rose to the position of full professor. 

During his time at the University he enjoyed a strong rapport with the technicians in the department, Klinzing said; they worked with him closely in the design and construction of novel and innovative experimental apparatus to study a variety of physical and chemical principles, including radioactive tracers. He served on the University Radiation Safety Committee for many years, and took a sabbatical at Cambridge.

Chiang is survived by three children, Annette (Eric Hsiung), currently conducting research in Pitt’s Department of Biological Sciences; Grace; and Justin, and grandchildren Alexander Chiang, Lauren Chiang, Benjamin Hsiung and Emmy Hsiung.

— Marty Levine