Eno Schmidt has volunteered his time for the Audit Committee of PBKNCA for many years, and has been most valuable to the Association.

In addition, Eno is the President of the Cupertino Library Foundation. For his work there he has been a recipient of Cupertino's CREST award. The CREST award stands for Cupertino Recognizes Extra Steps Taken. Every year the City of Cupertino gives their CREST Award to outstanding community volunteers. These individuals or groups have been nominated by their peers who recognize their contribution to the quality of life in Cupertino. Among those honored this year was Eno Schmidt.

Eno has taken the extra steps to enhance the quality and presence of the Library Foundation, the Cupertino Library and their services to the Cupertino community. He has forged a collaborative relationship with the Rotary Club of Cupertino which resulted in the Cupertino Library Foundation being named the beneficiary of the 2009 Rotary Golf Classic-ensuring a $25,000 grant for the planned Teen Room enhancement. Eno has worked tirelessly at leading the foundation and being willing to do the “small” and necessary tasks to get the job done. He has just been honored by receiving the 2009 CREST Award.

ΦBKNCA Annual Meeting and Awards Dinner - Sunday, May 3, 2009

The Teaching Excellence awardees for 2009 are:

• Kathryn Olmsted, Department of History, UC Davis
• Noah Guynn, Department of French and Italian, UC Davis
• William James Stover, Department of Political Science, University of Santa Clara

The Scholarship awardees for 2009 are:

• Esther Cole, UC Davis, Ecology
• Jordan Gans-Morse, UC Berkeley, Political Science
• Emily Jacobs, UC Berkeley, Neuroscience
• Mariangela Lisanti, Stanford, Physics (Norall Family Scholarship)
• Laurel Seely, UC Santa Cruz, Literature (Elizabeth B. Reed Memorial Scholarship)
• Amelia Wolf, Stanford, Biology

The awards were presented on May 3 in the collegial setting of the UC Berkeley Faculty Club at our Annual Dinner. On this occasion we celebrated our primary mission: providing scholarships and teaching awards to deserving scholars and professors to recognize and enhance their educational and research activities. More details here...

We need two volunteers for the Teaching Excellence Committee. This is a very important job, but it is not a hard job, and does not require attending meetings - all the work is done by email.

Information about the nominees is sent to the committee members, who evaluate the nominees and respond to the Chair. Some email discussion may ensue. That's it - that all the job involves

Volunteer now. Contact , Teaching Excellence Chair.

Some of you haven't renewed your membership yet. By now, you should have received a letter with an enclosed dues envelope from our President, Jean James, reminding you to renew. Your membership is important to us. The money you contribute goes to support our scholarships and teaching awards.

If you have do not have your envelope, with your initiation name, school and year of initiation, and we will send you a membership form.

Don't miss out on our events and the opportunity to support excellent scholars.

Renew right away!

Upcoming Activities

We have many interesting tours, about one per month, for our members. Check the newsletter for the latest. And click on the pictures at the left for some of the past events.

Currently, we have scheduled the following events.

• Historic Tour of the Presidio of San Francisco-Tuesday, July 14, 2009
• Tour of Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site, including Tao House- Saturday, September 19, 2009
• Delta Eco-Tour Saturday - October 10, 2009 11:00am
• The San Francisco Gourmet Chocolate Tour - Saturday, November 7, 2009

Respectfully submitted, , First Vice President - Programs

Board Member Honored

Janiece Nolan, Ph.D., Chapter Liaison Chair, has been named to the Contra Costa Commission for Women's Ninth Annual Hall of Fame in the category "Women Demonstrating Leadership". Dr. Nolan is President/CEO John Muir Physician Network. Her definition of leadership is "I taught leadership courses in the Naval reserve, and the thing we impressed upon people is that your leadership needs to be strong enough that your sailors are ready to die for you".

Janiece has been Chapter Liaison Chair of ΦBK NCA since 2005. She is responsible for maintaining contact with the ΦBK Chapters in Northern California as well as for informing new inductees to ΦBK of the advantages of joining our Association.

See "A conversation with Janiece Nolan of John Muir Physician Network" in the East Bay Business Times for more information about her, and also the Contra Coasta Commission for Women's website.

And... Your Money at Work

Dear Ms. Sandstrom,

I write to express my gratitude to Phi Beta Kappa and its scholarship program, on the occasion of some good news I've recently received.

Here's the situation: in the summer of 1997 I received a Phi Beta Kappa scholarship which allowed me to finish my dissertation, in Russian history at Berkeley. I was thrilled and honored and grateful, and finished the dissertation, but I'm not sure I ever communicated how important that support was, or what its fruits were.

Last year, my revised dissertation became a book, *The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism*. It was published by Cornell University Press. I'm gratified to say that it has just won one major award and received honorable mention for another, both given by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies:

Winner, 2008 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize (for best first monograph in history);
Honorable Mention, 2008 Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (for most important contribution to the field)

In a few days, the AAASS will be sending notification of this fact to you at Phi Beta Kappa. But I wanted to write ahead of this fact, both to remind you of the connection and to thank you in your capacity as vice president for scholarships for the wonderful and important work you do. Sometimes it takes a while for this to come to fruition, but these scholarships mean a lot to the people who receive them!

I don't know if you have a library of works produced with PBK money, but if you do, I would be very happy to send you a copy of this book. Or if you just want one for yourself, do let me know!

In the meantime, please accept again my gratitude.

Best wishes,
John Randolph
'97 scholarship recipient

Robert Pringle was one of our Scholarship awardees in 2007, receiving a grant of $5,000 to further his research. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania, received two MSc degrees with distinction from Oxford University, and is a graduate student in ecology at Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.

At present he's working in Kenya with Professor Todd Palmer of the University of Florida, studying "mutualism." The ΦBKNCA grant helps support him in this research.

The thorny acacia trees of East Africa live in close harmony with ant colonies, and each depends on the other for health and survival - but disrupting that relationship can lead to death and danger, scientists have discovered.

And that, they say, could threaten the habitats of Africa's largest animals in many regions of the continent.

Normally, the huge swollen thorns on the branches of the scrubby trees provide housing for the ants, and they feed on rich nectar from the base of the acacia leaves. In exchange, the tiny biting insects guard and protect the trees by swarming out to repel big browsers like elephants and giraffes that would otherwise feed destructively on the acacia leaves.

The entire article was in the "San Francisco Chronicle", January 11, 2008, main section, "Tiny changes can trigger big evolutionary shifts," by David Perlman (Chronicle Science Editor), p. 6 (in dead-trees version), or online.

Are You a Young Phi Bete?

The Board is still trying to form a group of young Phi Betes who might want to have their own activities. However, our first problem is what constitutes a "young Phi Bete." Traditionally for organizations, the cut-off age for "younger" members is 40. But as far as we are concerned, if you still have hair which is not completely gray and feel young at heart, and especially if you want to be in charge of some event, you qualify.

It seems the best way to communicate with younger members is through our website, so please check out the Young Phi Bete page to see if anything is happening for those of us who don't remember life before tv.

Association Honored by the National Society

Our Association received a significant honor at the concluding banquet of the Triennial in Seattle Aug. 6-10, 2003. The award included a check for $1000 that we may use for either our endowment or scholarship fund. We also received the certificate pictured at the left. Click on the image to see an enlarged view.

The wording on the Certificate of Recognition is:

(Signed by Joseph W. Gordon, President and John Churchill, Secretary)