Mead award is a heavenly dream come true

A new endowment created to honor Ernest Mead supports the kind of faculty-student interaction the professor emeritus of music exemplifies. The Ernest C. Mead Endowment board this fall honored 10 faculty members for their efforts, and Steven Majewski, associate professor of astronomy, won the group’s “Faculty Dream” award to enrich students’ experiences beyond the classroom.

Majewski will take one or two students to Arizona or Chile to view the heavens through a world-class telescope. “There is nothing quite like the thrill of really journeying to one remote world — a distant mountaintop with an extraordinarily dark and star-studded sky — to use a gigantic telescope to peer into another, much more remote world out in the heavens,” said Majewski in his entry essay. “My goal is to be able to share this unique experience with other students — both scientist and poet.”