Newsmakers

Sawyers ’81

PHOTO: RICK DEWITT/MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER

ERIC LANDER ’78 and CHARLES SAWYERS ’81 were two of 11 inaugural recipients of the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the world’s richest prize for medicine and biology. President and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Lander was a leader of the Human Genome Project. Sawyers is the chairman of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The director of Prince­ton’s genomics institute, David Botstein, also received the prize. ... Family Care International — whose president is ANN STARRS *89 — won a MacArthur Founda­tion Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. Family Care International aims to make pregnancy and childbirth safer for mothers. ... George Mason University professor DAN COHEN ’90 has been named the founding executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, which was begun to create a “large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.”