Robert Bruce, chairman of the Dresden School Board, resigned Tuesday night after the Board indefinitely postponed voting on a statement to endorse a plea agreement for Hanover High students charged with stealing exams last spring. Bruce, who voted for the postponement, cited the divisiveness of the cheating scandal as influencing his vote. The Board also debated the appropriateness of its involvement in a court case. While residents petitioned the board to endorse a plea agreement between students and prosecutors last month, staff members at Hanover High School signed a counter-statement opposing any such intervention.
Todd Poret, a pediatrician at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, received the first Alan A. Rozycki Commitment to Excellence Award for his combination of medical knowledge and compassionate patient care. The award is named for Alan Rozycki '61 DMS'63 who is retiring after 35 years as a pediatrician at DHMC. Henry Bernstein, DMS professor of pediatrics, established the award to honor Rozycki's work in the Upper Valley and highlight pediatricians whose work had improved the quality of patient experience at DHMC.
Celia Chen '78, professor of biological sciences, and Carol Folt, dean of the faculty and professor of biological sciences, contributed to research that has discovered alarmingly high levels of mercury and arsenic in Lake Baiyangdian in North China. A source of food and drinking water, the lake contains concentrations above the threshold the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers to be harmful to humans and wildlife. The pair coauthored an article reporting their findings in the journal Water, Air and Soil Pollution, along with Paul Pickhardt of Lakeland College and M.Q. Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. The researchers were interested in understanding how toxic environmental metals move through the food web in a polluted ecosystem.