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September 7, 2010, Volume 57, No. 02

Mr. Chance, Trustee

Chance

Henry Chance II, a longtime member of the board of Trustees, died July 27 in Kennett Square.  He was 98 years old.
 
Born in Pottsville, PA, Mr. Chance received a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Penn in 1934.  As a student, he was a member of the Delta Psi Fraternity, The Compass and Chain Society and the Varsity Club, as well as lightweight football, lightweight rowing and lacrosse. 
Mr. Chance, former president and chairman of United Engineers and Constructors in Philadelphia, joined the board of Trustees in 1964.  He was accorded emeritus status in 1982 and was designated an honorary trustee in 2001.  He served as a member of the Investment Board, Audit Committee and Budget and Finance Committee.
 
Mr. Chance also served on the Penn Museum’s board of overseers for 20 years beginning in 1976 and was later granted emeritus status.  He was a member of the Loren Eisely Society and the Society of Arts and Sciences in SAS.  He was also a member of the board of overseers of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, The Chemistry Committee, Computer Center Committee and was a member of the Penn Club of New York.  Mr. Chance received the Alumni Award of Merit and an honorary degree from Penn in 1983.  He was also elected to the Gallery of Distinguished Alumni.
 
Mr. Chance came from a family with deep roots at Penn. He was preceded here by his grandfather, a member of the class of 1874 and his father, who graduated in 1907 and also served as a Trustee. Mr. Chance’s five sons all attended Penn as well as his granddaughter and several nieces and nephews.  His brother, Britton Chance (CH’35, GR’40, HON’85) is a professor emeritus of biochemistry and biophysics.  Together, they established the Edwin M. Chance Professorship in Biochemistry and Biophysics in the School of Medicine in honor of their father.

Mr. Chance is survived by his wife, Elisabeth; sons, Steven, Edwin, James and Mark; daughters Suzanne Schenkel and Barbara Stone; 10 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.  

Donations in honor of Mr. Chance may be sent to Penn Engineering.

 

 

Lu Gan, Penn Freshman

Lu Gan, a member of the class of 2013, died July 30 following a long illness.  She was 19.
 
Known as Lucy to her friends, Ms. Gan was born in Lanzhou, China, and lived in Beijing.  In high school Ms. Gan had studied in Japan as an exchange student and was an advocate for exchange students studying in China.  At Penn, she studied English Literature and Japanese and participated in Latin and Ballroom Dance.  One of eight students in her class admitted directly from China, Ms. Lu was a member of the Chinese Student Association and the Wharton China Association.  She is survived by her parents, Weijun Gan and Yahong Huang.  A funeral was held on August 4 in Yeadon, PA.  Memorials are being planned by the Gregory College House, where Ms. Gan resided, and the Wharton China Association for early fall.  

 

 

Mrs. Kelly, Law School

Kelly

Elizabeth (“Liz”) Slusser Kelly, longtime director of the Biddle Law Library, died on July 14 at the age of 72.
 
Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Mrs. Kelly graduated from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her Juris Doctor from Southern Illinois University School of Law and then served as director of its Law Library. 
In 1984, she came to Penn to serve as director of the Biddle Law Library. She retired in 2001 as Director and Professor of Law. 

Mrs. Kelly was the leading force behind the transformation of the Law Library in the early ‘80s. Upon her appointment, the library was disorganized and overcrowded, but Mrs. Kelly implemented changes that improved customer service and established a classification system modeled after the Library of Congress. Working tirelessly to make Biddle one of the best law research libraries in the country, her vision came to life with the completion of Tanenbaum Hall in 1993.
 
The building provided a new home for the Biddle Law Library, which would become its spacious, high-tech centerpiece. During her 17 years as director, Mrs. Kelly also expanded the information technology and media services departments; increased the archival collection and led an effort to fund the library through the Friends of Biddle. 

Mrs. Kelly received the Distinguished Service Award from the Law Alumni Society and became the first female emeritus faculty member in the history of the Penn Law School.

She is survived by her husband of 52 years, Matthew Kelly; sons, Mark and Michael; daughters, Sarah and Margaret Horn; sister, Margaret Griess; brother, Father Michael Stephen Slusser; and nine grandchildren.
 
Memorial donations may be sent to the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, Law Development and Alumni Relations, University of Pennsylvania Law School, 3400 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

 

 

 

Dr. Koelle, Pharmacology

Dr. Winifred A. Koelle, a retired internist and professor of pharmacology, died July 30 in Bryn Mawr.  She was 84 years old.
 
Raised in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, by her father, a Dutch colonial official and her American mother, Dr. Koelle and her family were interned by the Japanese during World War II.  She learned science and chemistry from educated women in the labor camps.
 
When the war ended, she attended Wellesley College and then obtained a medical degree from Columbia University. Early in her career, she was a fellow in research medicine at Penn before going on to become the chief of the intensive care unit at Taylor Hospital. She and her husband also spent a year teaching at Pahlavi University in Iran.
 
From 1970-1975, Dr. Koelle was chief of outpatient medicine at Philadelphia General Hospital.  She taught at Penn in the pharmacology department until her retirement in 1982. 

Her husband, Dr. George Koelle, who died in 1997, taught in the department for 37 years (Almanac February  18, 1997). Dr. Koelle is survived by three sons, William, Peter and Jonathan and two grandchildren.

A funeral was held at the Quadrangle in August and a memorial is planned for the fall.

 

 

Mr. Nakazato, Penn Design

Nakazato

Hitoshi Nakazato, an artist, printmaker and professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts, died July 17 from head injuries related to a fall. He was 74.
 
A native of Tokyo, Japan, Mr. Nakazato earned a bachelor of fine arts from Tama University of Arts in 1960. Four years later, he graduated with a MS in art from the University of Wisconsin. He received an MFA from Penn’s Graduate School of Fine Arts (GSFA) in 1966

Prior to beginning his career at Penn, Mr. Nakazato taught oil painting at his alma mater in Tokyo and worked in New York on a Rockefeller III Fund Grant. After being selected for an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art at the Guggenheim Museum, he was invited to join the GSFA faculty in 1971 as a master printer.

Mr. Nakazato established the Print Studio at Penn in 1979 and was responsible for reinstituting the printmaking major, which had been discontinued years before his arrival.  He was the chairman of the Graduate School of Fine Arts from 1995-1999, and retired from Penn in 2007.
 
Mr. Nakazato helped to curate four shows at Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery, a show of faculty and alumni work, student work, the work of Asian students and a retrospective of his own work in 2007 (Almanac May 8, 2007).  He was known for encouraging faculty and students alike to make and display their own prints.
 
Mr. Nakazato’s work was displayed in many museums and galleries around the world, including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Toyko, the Tikotin Museum in Haifa, Israel, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Mr. Nakazato is survived by his wife, Sumiko Takeda Nakazato; a son, Gene; daughter, Amy Filaci; two sisters, one brother and two grandchildren.

 

 

Dr. Ross, Philosophy

Ross

Dr. James F. Ross, professor of philosophy and law, passed away on July 12 at the age of 78 from complications of endocarditis.

Dr. Ross was a distinguished scholar of medieval philosophy who also worked in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of law, theology, and philosophy of religion. He had been a member of the department of philosophy since 1962 and was the former chairman.

A native of Rhode Island, Dr. Ross received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from the Catholic University of America in 1953 and 1954, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1958.  From 1959 to 1962 he was an instructor and then assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He earned a law degree from Penn in 1974.  His broad research interests ranged from his specialty in medieval philosophy to contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of law, theology, and philosophy of religion. 

His publications included Philosophical Theology (Bobbs Merrill, 1968),  Portraying Analogy (Cambridge University Press, 1982), and most recently, Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).  At the time of his death he was writing a monograph on the animal basis of distinctively human cognition, tentatively entitled, “Willing Belief and the Islands of Consciousness.”

His own death followed closely upon the loss of his wife of 54 years, Kathleen, to cancer in May 2010.  A funeral Mass was held July 17 for him in Providence, Rhode Island.

A memorial service will be held in Octoberat the University of Pennsylvania and the department of philosophy will establish a prize essay in honor of Dr. Ross. Donations to the prize fund may be sent to the department, 433 Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304.

Dr. Ross is survived by sons, Seamus and Richard; daughters, Therese and Ellen; a sister; and seven grandchildren.

 

Dr. Selove, Physics

Selove

Dr. Walter Selove, professor emeritus of physics, died August 24 at the age of 88.  Born in Chicago, Dr. Selove received his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD all from the University of Chicago in the 1940s.

He began teaching at Penn in 1957. Prior to that, he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and the National Laboratories at Argonne and Livermore, and taught for six years at Harvard University.
 
Dr. Selove was a National Research Council Fellow, and NSF Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is credited with building the first “fast-chopper” neutron spectrometer, which measures neutron cross-sections in the “resonance” region for separated isotopes. He also detected, along with others, the third meson resonance, which he named F-zero in honor of his wife, Dr. Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, professor emerita of physics.  Dr. Selove, along with his colleages, started the high energy physics grant at Penn around 1957.  He is credited, along with Howard Brody, with discovering the first evidence of Regge-pole behavior of nucleons. He developed the first two-dimensional particle calorimeter and observed the first hadron jets from quark-quark scattering.   Dr. Selove has patents on aspects of radar and has published hundreds of articles. He was the vice-chairman of the Federation of American Scientists and a member of the first two Pugwash Meetings. He was also a consultant to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the Congress for five years.
 
Dr. Selove was accorded emeritus status in 1992. He is survived by his wife, Fay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Report A Death

Almanac appreciates being informed of the deaths of current and former faculty and staff members, students, and other members of the University community.

However, notices of alumni deaths should be directed to the Alumni Records Office at Room 545, Franklin Building, (215) 898-8136 or e-mail record@ben.dev.upenn.edu.

 

Almanac - September 7, 2010, Volume 57, No. 02