Sylvia Poggioli Senior European Correspondent, Foreign Desk
Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR s International Desk covering political, economic, and cultural news in Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli s on-air reporting and analysis have encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.
Since joining NPR s foreign desk in 1982, Poggioli has traveled extensively for reporting assignments. These include going to Norway to cover the aftermath of the brutal attacks by a right-wing extremist; to Greece, Spain, and Portugal reporting on the eurozone crisis; and the Balkans where the last wanted war criminals have been arrested.
MIT faculty defend professor against trumped-up charges related to China ties
In a letter to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President L. Rafael Reif, a draft of which was posted to Twitter, 100 MIT faculty members issued a resounding defense of their colleague, Professor Gang Chen, who was indicted last week on charges of wire fraud and tax violations and failing to disclose financial ties to China.
The Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office issued a press release January 20 reporting that Chen, the director of the MIT Pappalardo Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory and director of the Solid-State Solar Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S3TEC), was charged in a criminal complaint and arrested on January 14.
Clarence Allen, 1925–2021 March 23, 2021
Clarence Allen (MS 51, PhD 54), professor of geology and geophysics, emeritus, and a prominent seismologist, passed away on January 21, 2021. He was 96 years old.
Allen was born on February 15, 1925, in Palo Alto, California. His father, an educator, began his career teaching blacksmithing and eventually became a professor at the Claremont Colleges; while his mother died during the birth of his sister when he was in sixth grade. He developed an early love of geography, cartography, and the outdoors while on family road trips throughout the American West, interests that left him well suited for his role as a navigator in B-29s when he served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific during World War II. He began his higher education at Reed College in 1942, but left to spend three years in the service from 1943 to 1946, and then returned to graduate with a bachelor s degree in physics in 1949.