Sharon Paul ’78 may never have launched her career in choral conducting if the late William F. Russell, Pomona’s music director from 1951-82, hadn’t been tardy to choir practice. Paul serendipitously took the baton in his stead, unaware of her professor’s arrival.

“I think he watched from the back and thought, ‘Oh! That’s what Sharon should do with her life,’” Paul says. “He saw my abilities, felt I had strengths and nurtured them. I don’t think I would have found conducting if I went to any other school.”

Since then, Paul has carved out an illustrious career in choral conducting and, in February, will return to the Pomona campus as clinician of the 2012 Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association (PSICA) Festival. Pomona, a founding member of the association in 1922, is hosting the festival for the first time in the College’s recorded history. Per tradition, the host school’s choral director selects the festival’s clinician. Donna Di Grazia, Pomona’s choral director and music professor, knew exactly who she wanted.

Sharon Paul '78

Di Grazia, who is coordinating the festival, points not only to Paul’s talent as a musician and choral conductor, but also to the fact that her “professional work serves as a terrific example of how a liberal arts education can set a foundation that can lead to a significant career in the performing arts.”

Paul, who entered Pomona at age 16, is equally pleased. “I’m so excited, I feel silly. I’m so happy to be coming back,” says Paul, who lives in Oregon with her husband of 16 years and their seventh-grade son. “I’m feeling very nostalgic about my time at Pomona, and the further I get in my career, the more I realize how seminal that time was. I can’t wait to walk the campus, be in the music building, just remember.”

Paul has directed choirs around the globe—Berlin, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Singapore and elsewhere. Holding an M.F.A from UCLA and a D.M.A. in choral conducting from Stanford University, Paul currently serves as professor of music, chair of vocal and choral studies and director of choral activities at the University of Oregon. For eight years prior, she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) and conductor of the organization’s acclaimed ensembles, Chorissima and Virtuose. Paul joined the SFGC following what she called a “quirky career move,” having left a tenured professor position at Chico State to do so.

As clinician of the 2012 festival, which will bring together about a dozen Southern California collegiate choirs to perform for each other, Paul will provide expert critiques of each choir’s performance, lead a two-hour master class comprised of eight singers from each ensemble and conduct these top vocalists in a performance. She also will coach student conductors during the master class. Visiting performers will find in Paul an engaging conductor and teacher, enduringly influenced by her former instructor, Leonard Pronko, a Pomona professor since 1957. “He was the most engaging educator I’d ever seen, and that stuck with me,” Paul says.

The PSICA festival will be held Feb. 25. Information: www.psica.org.

In an impressive feat for Pomona, a pair of alumni will helm the nation’s 40,000-plus neuroscientists in back-to-back presidencies of the prestigious Society for Neuroscience.

Moses Chao ’73 has been in the lead since November 2011, and in October, President-elect Larry Swanson ’68 will take over. Both began their scientific careers in Claremont as the study of the brain and nervous system came of age.

Moses Chao '73

Moses Chao majored in biochemistry at Pomona, where he did research with Professor Corwin Hansch.

After a break from academics, working as a counselor in New York City, he returned to Southern California to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry at UCLA. It was not until he started his own laboratory at the Cornell University Medical College in New York in 1984, that Chao turned his attention to something brain-related: a molecule called nerve growth factor, or NGF. He sought to identify the receptor that nerves use to grab onto NGF, like catching a baseball in a mitt.

Today, in his laboratory at New York University, Chao still works on growth factors including NGF and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). As their names suggest, these proteins promote nerve survival and growth, so they are crucial during early child development. But they continue to work in the adult brain, maintaining the connections between nerve cells. With aging, these growth factors often start to disappear, and the nerve connections begin to disintegrate. Too little BDNF, for example, might lead to Alzheimer’s disease, Chao says.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that scientists have tried providing growth factors as treatments for diseases of the nervous system such as Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. But they have had little luck; the problem, Chao says, is that growth factors are large, sticky proteins that do not cross the blood-brain barrier and penetrate to the right location.

What if there was a better way? In 2001, Chao and colleagues reported, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on another option: a small molecule, adenosine, which mimicked the effects of growth factors on cells living in a dish. Adenosine has side effects in many tissues, such as the heart—but Chao says the paper proved that it should be possible to find small molecules that move through the body to the brain cells that need them. A decade later, his hunt goes on:

“We’re still plugging away and trying to identify drugs that have protective effects,” Chao says.

With the Society for Neuroscience, Chao served on various committees, as secretary, and as an editor of the Society’s Journal of Neuroscience before his presidency. In his current role, Chao is focused on science funding. “Everybody’s anxious about funding because of the gridlock in Washington,” he says.

Larry Swanson '68

Larry Swanson discovered his love for neuroscience before it was called “neuroscience.” While studying chemistry at Pomona, he took a course with Professor Clinton Trafton in what was then referred to as “physiological psychology.” Hooked on the study of the brain, he furthered his studies with a Ph.D. in neurobiology, from one of the nation’s first programs at Washington University in St. Louis. There, he was wowed by scientists studying how different chemicals controlled the appetites of rats: one treatment made the animals hungry, another made them thirsty. How did the nerves in the brain control these desires? Swanson is still trying to figure that out today as a professor at the University of Southern California.

Although neuroscientists have a good handle on the interactions between one nerve cell and another, they don’t have an overall picture of the brain’s circuitry, Swanson says. The brain has between 500 and 1,000 regions, and they talk to each other via a myriad of mostly-unknown connections.

Swanson is part of an effort to map how all the different parts of the brain interact. This unified wiring diagram is the “connectome,” so-called in a nod to the sum of all genetic codes called the genome. It’s the nervous system equivalent of the old skeleton song—“the leg-bone connected to the knee-bone,” and so on— but with an estimated 100,000 connections, the brain’s interactions are unlikely to be summarized with a simple ditty. Swanson’s team is developing computer programs to keep track of all the interactions.

The current lack of a brain map is stonewalling researchers trying to develop medicines for conditions like schizophrenia. “We’re almost at a dead end in terms of trying to get effective cures,” Swanson says. “We need to know how the brain works in order to fix it.” For example, he wants to suss out the parts of the brain that connect together to control appetite. If he knew which part of that circuit goes wrong in someone who is obese, for example, he might be able to repair the wiring, shutting down hunger.

Swanson attended the first Society for Neuroscience meeting in 1971 and has come back every year since. Like Chao, he served on committees, as secretary and as editor for the Journal of Neuroscience. During his tenure as president, Swanson hopes to boost international collaboration among neuroscientists.

Emeritus Professor Edward W. Malan ’48, one of the most influential members in the history of the Pomona College Physical Education Department, died Sept. 6, 2011, at age 88.

Malan came to Pomona as a student in the early 1940s and was already active in athletics, playing football and earning a letter as a running tackle, when, in May 1943, he was among a contingent of men who left campus for the U.S. Army. After serving with distinction in Europe, he returned to Pomona, graduating in 1948 and joining the faculty as an instructor two years later. He went on to earn a master’s at the Claremont Graduate School as well as an Ed.D. from UCLA, and in 1960 was promoted to professor of physical education and named director of athletics, a role he filled through 1978. During this time the challenging yet rewarding process of equalizing men’s and women’s athletics was begun, and the number of intercollegiate competitive sports rose from seven to 17.

In addition to coaching several years of both varsity and frosh football (including an 8-0 season with the 1950 frosh football team in his first year), Professor Malan coached track and field until 1966 and golf later on in his career. He founded the department’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1958, oversaw its induction ceremonies for 42 years and in 1989 was himself awarded an honorary induction. That same year, he also received the SCIAC Distinguished Service Award. Along with serving as the College’s NCAA representative, he was very active in the NCAA Council and was elected to the presidency for Division III.

As a resident of Claremont, he was elected to the City Council twice, for the 1962-66 term and again for 1968-72, during which time he was mayor from 1970-72. He retired from Pomona in 1989 but remained active with the College and, in 2001, received its Alumni Distinguished Service Award.

“Coach Malan was a class act and a wonderful person,” says Athletics Director Charles Katsiaficas. “We all looked up to him; he was a great role model and mentor to so many of us through the years. We are blessed for the many years he shared with us here at Pomona.”

Richard M. Sheirich, emeritus professor of German, died from cardiac arrest at his home in Claremont on Dec. 11, 2011. He was 84 years old.

He was born in 1927 in Erie, Penn., and attended local schools through high school. As his parents felt 16 was too young to go to college, he spent an extra year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, graduating in 1945. He attended Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., for part of his freshman year before enlisting in the U.S. Navy. After a year’s service at Williamsburg, Va., he was discharged and returned to Colgate to complete his undergraduate degree in 1949.

He earned a master’s degree in German from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in German from Harvard University in 1965. He also held a DAAD Fellowship at Universität Hamburg in 1957-58. After teaching at Colgate and UC Berkeley, he joined the Pomona faculty in 1965, and for 31 years taught courses in German language, literature and culture ranging from early tribal migrations to the Cold War and reunification. He also conducted research on Viennese poet, novelist and playwright Richard Beer-Hofmann, producing a number of articles as well as an edition of Beer-Hofmann’s correspondence, Der Briefwechsel mit Paula, 1896-1937. Most summers, Professor Sheirich spent time in Vienna, doing research.

In the 1990s he led a major grant-funded project, “German across the Curriculum,” to better integrate the study of German into non-language courses in the humanities and social sciences.The goal of the project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was to improve foreign-language skills and to promote, among both faculty and students, a greater understanding of the complexities inherent in a foreign culture and of the relationship between language and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

He also served on the Alumni Council and, more recently, on the Emeriti Committee. Many in the college community will miss seeing him walk with his wife of 49 years, Perdita, class notes editor for PCM, to and from campus in the early evening.

Upon retiring, Professor Sheirich expressed his gratitude for the fact that “one becomes a part of college life, yes, but it works the other way, too. The College, and a surprising number of students, also become a part of our lives.”

Memorial contributions to a fund supporting research and travel for students in German may be made to Pomona College, in care of Don Pattison, Donor Relations, 550 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711.

Herbert B. Smith, emeritus professor of history, died Sept. 28, 2011, at his home in Mount San Antonio Gardens, Claremont, where he had lived since 1985. He was 93.

After obtaining his B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1940, he taught social studies for a year before he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Officer Candidate School. After graduation, he became the post chemical officer at Camp Butner, N.C., where, among other duties, he conducted countless drills against chemical attack for the units stationed there. He later was assigned to the information and education headquarters in Paris, helping to establish a post-hostilities education program for soldiers awaiting their return home.

After earning his M.A. degree in history at the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in history at UC Berkeley, Professor Smith came to Pomona College in 1952. He was hired to teach French history, which he did for many years, regularly offering such courses as Absolutism and the Enlightenment in Europe, The French Revolution and the European Response and the History of Russia, in addition to Western Civilization. Smith also served as associate director of admissions and director of financial aid during the 1960s, and it was on his watch that Pomona established a policy of “need-blind” admissions.

After a one-year, Fulbright-funded sabbatical at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, he returned to full-time teaching at Pomona in 1969. Besides offering a new course on Southeast Asia, Smith was one of the creators of the two-semester introductory Asian history sequence—Asian Traditions and Revolution and Social Change in Modern Asia—that is still taught today.

He loved to travel, and he and his wife Dorothy traveled in the way that adventurous people did in the 1950s and early 1960s—by freighter and local trains and buses—to countries in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa that did not see many American tourists in those days.

Smith retired in 1983 as the John Sutter Miner Professor of History after 31 years of teaching at Pomona. At the time, the College reported that he confessed to having had three serious loves in his life: his late wife, Dorothy, formerly a psychologist at Monsour Counseling Center; Clio, the muse of history; and the goddess Pomona. Shortly before he died, his fellow residents at Mount San Antonio Gardens made him the poet laureate of the Gardens.