Sarah Cohen Wins MDA Lifetime Achievement Award

Author, editor, and playwright Sarah Blacher Cohen of the Department of English has received the Life-Time Achievement Award from the Albany Muscular Dystrophy Association. Sarah’s academic and creative writing career have been a success despite the fact that she has the neuro-muscular disease, Charcot Marie Tooth.

A faculty member at the University for the past 25 years, Cohen teaches courses in Jewish-American literature, drama, playwriting, and comedy. As a researcher, she is the author of Saul Bellow’s Enigmatic Laughter and Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy. She was the chief editor for the books Comic Relief; From Hester Street to Hollywood; Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor; and a recent anthology of plays published by the Syracuse University Press, Making A Scene: The Contemporary Drama of Jewish-American Women. She is also the general editor of the SUNY Press Series, Modern Jewish Literature and Culture, and the Wayne State University Press Series, Humor in Life and Letters.

Cohen has been a Distinguished Fulbright Professor to Yugoslavia, a media consultant to the National Endowment for Humanities and a humor consultant for the Library of Congress.

As a playwright, Cohen has written and had productions of seven plays across the country. In 1984, she collaborated with Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer on the off-Broadway play, Schlemiel the First. From 1989 to 1994, her comedy about disability, The Ladies Locker Room, received two major grants and was performed around the country.

Her play, Sophie, Totie and Belle, co-authored with Chicago playwright, Joanne Koch, is a musical play about a fictional meeting in the afterlife of Sophie Tucker, Totie Fields, and Belle Barth.

Because of its success in the playhouses across the U.S., Cohen and her collaborator wrote another play with music: Sophie Tucker: Red Hot Yiddishe Mama, which was enthusiastically received in Summer 1996 in the Berkshires. It was also sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute as a benefit for Disabled Students on April 12 and April 13 at the Egg’s Lewis Swyer Theater.

Some of her other comedy/drama works include “The Old System” and “Molly Picon’s Return Engagement.”

During the last ten years of her career, Cohen has begun to deal explicitly with disability in her writing and teaching. In addition to her play about disability, The Ladies Locker Room, published in her anthology, Making a Scene, she is editing another anthology, The Drama of the Physically Challenged. She plans to teach a course and write a book on the Yoke and the Joke: the Humor of Disability in Literature and Life.

Cohen has also been a zealous champion of the physically challenged. She has not only donated her plays to be used as benefits for disabled individuals at the University and the Albany Jewish Community Center (JCC) , but she has spent semesters of her time planning and producing these benefits. She has been honored for her work by the University’s Office of Disabled Student Services, the YWCA and the Albany JCC.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala has appointed David O. Carpenter, dean of the School of Public Health, to serve on the prestigious National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council. As part of the 12-member Council, Carpenter will advise the Shalala and the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences on matters related to environmental research and the effects of pollution on human health.

Carpenter, who has served as dean of the public health school since 1985, has had a long-standing involvement in environmental research. For the past ten years, he has served as lead investigator for the Superfund project at the Akwesasne reservation. In that position, he coordinated an extensive multidisciplinary research program into the human health effects of PCBs and related pollutants at Akwesasne, a reservation which is home to 12,000 Mohawk Indians located in far northern New York State on the St. Lawrence River.

A neurophysiologist by training, Carpenter began his research career doing basic investigations of the mechanisms involved in the uptake of calcium by cell membranes. Several years ago, he applied this basic research to investigations of the way in which heavy metals, including lead, mercury and aluminum, interfere with calcium uptake in membranes. This research has led him to test numerous hypotheses on how heavy metals may cause a variety of nervous system disorders, including strokes, as well as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

At Akwesasne, Carpenter coordinated research into numerous facets of the extensive environmental pollutants that contaminate the reservation’s air, water and soil. The Mohawks living at Akwesasne have traditionally relied on fish and wildlife as a source of nutrition, but in recent years they have been concerned about the industrial sources located near the reservation.

One of their major concerns is the General Motors’ Foundry in Massena, which has been identified as a federal Superfund site. Over a period of many years, the foundry released huge quantities of PCBs into the environment. These and related pollutants now contaminate the soil, water, air and wildlife at Akwesasne, making it impossible for the native peoples to safely maintain their hunting and fishing traditions.

In a series of three major funding cycles, the latest of which provided $13.2 million for five years of study, Superfund researchers under Carpenter’s supervision have conducted a wide-ranging investigation of the Mohawks’ exposure to the pollution, as well as the effects of PCBs on animals, the ecosystem and the development of engineering techniques to assist in clean-up. The researchers are studying, among other things, the way in which children’s growth, maturation and cognitive development may have been affected by the presence of toxic chemicals polluting Akwesasne. Part of the Superfund research is also directed at investigating clean-up methods for the site.

The research at Akwesasne is part of the nationwide Superfund program administered by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The intent of the program is to address clean-up of sites on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund List, the federal government’s tally of hazardous waste sites that deserve top priority for remediation.

Carpenter, who is one of only a handful of researchers from the Capital Region ever to be appointed to an NIH Advisory Council, has a long-time involvement working with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He says he looks forward to his new responsibilities.

“This exciting appointment is reflective of the leadership that we in the School of Public Health have taken on issues of major importance to the University at Albany and the New York State Department of Health, our parent institutions,” Carpenter said. “We have been particularly aggressive in addressing issues related to environmental health, particularly the relationship between pollution and the health of children. I hope to continue to work toward the advancement of these important causes in my new advisory role.”

Part of his work on the advisory council will consist of making recommendations to Shalala on how NIH should conduct environmental research, training and health-information dissemination programs throughout the U.S.

Carpenter received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1965. He opted for a career in laboratory research rather than medicine. After 15 years at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Mary., Carpenter moved to Albany in 1980 and served for five years as the director of the Wadsworth Laboratories, a branch of the New York State Department of Health. He championed the development of practice-based public health education, a move that eventually led to the establishment of the University’s School of Public Health, where he was named dean.