News Release

Chicago chemist wins national award for service to society through chemistry

Grant and Award Announcement

American Chemical Society

Zafra M. Lerman of Chicago will be honored March 25 by the world's largest scientific society for her extraordinary efforts toward the release of imprisoned scientists in China, Russia and the former Soviet Union, as well as toward educational opportunities for disadvantaged students. She will receive the 2003 Charles Lathrop Parsons Award from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in New Orleans.

"Equal access to science education is a human right that belongs to all," said Lerman, who is both professor and head of the science institute at Columbia College. Her conviction is manifest internationally as well as in the Chicago area, where she lives.

Among myriad accomplishments is her contribution to the safe passage of Chinese dissident and astrophysicist Fang Li-Zhi. A leading voice among those who criticized China's lack of intellectual freedom, Fang took refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing during the months after the government's crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

Lerman joined the effort to bring him out of China, meeting with Fang and shuttling his and other supporters' letters back and forth despite the displeasure of Chinese authorities. And in 1991, after he had reached the United States, "Professor Fang's first speech back to China, in Chinese, was broadcast by the Voice of America from my office," she said.

The seemingly tireless chemist and advocate is only the second woman to receive the biannual Parsons Award since its inception in 1952, and she is in good company: Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, for example, and Franklin Long, a member of the science advisory committee under three presidents, also won for their distinguished service. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin read Lerman's achievement on the floor of the U.S. Senate earlier this year.

Nor does her crusade end with her colleagues. At Columbia College, an urban school for the performing arts, she has developed a special method of teaching science to all ages.

"One group [I teach] is very, very poor kids -- even homeless; and we visualize chemistry through dance," she said. Many of her students end up getting scholarships to college, and one is even studying for a Ph.D. in biochemistry, she added.

Lerman received her undergraduate degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1960 and her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1969. She is a member of the ACS division of chemical education and for 17 years has headed the ACS subcommittee on scientific freedom and human rights.

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