Margaret Arcus, director of the School of Family and Nutritional Sciences, is the 1996 recipient of the Honour Award, the highest award bestowed by the Canadian Home Economics Association (CHEA) recognizing leadership and service to the profession and the association.

A leader in the field of family life education, Arcus helped create the Certified Family Life Education Program for the National Council on Family Relations, setting standards for the field.

She has represented CHEA and the B.C. Home Economics Association at the International Federation for Home Economics for the past 16 years, serving as a vice-president of the federation from 1990 to 1994.

Arcus joined UBC in 1968 after completing her PhD at Iowa State University where she also served on faculty.

CHEA is the professional association for graduates in home economics, human ecology, consumer and family studies and related courses.

The award was presented to Arcus at the organization's annual conference in Toronto.

Commerce Prof. Martin Puterman received the Lanchester Prize for his book Markov Decision Processes at the biannual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Atlanta recently.

The prize is the top annual award in the field of operations research published in English. Puterman spent six years working on the book which was published by John Wiley and Sons in 1994.

Markov decision processes, also called stochastic dynamic programs, are used in a wide range of applications involving repeated decisions over time and take into consideration the continual changes that occur in a given system, whether the system involves setting inventory levels in a retail business, allocating airline seats to fare classes, or releasing water from a reservoir.

Puterman teaches courses in stochastic dynamic programming and applied statistics and has been extensively involved in applying operations research models to local organizations, including the Workers' Compensation Board of B.C.

Michael Smith, a professor in the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, received a Doctor of Science from the University of Toronto recently.

It is the 19th honorary degree Smith has received since he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

In Ottawa recently, Smith attended the presentation of the Michael Smith Awards for Science Promotion.

Among the winners were the Shad Valley Program, Hilda Lei Ching of the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology, and the Vancouver Aquarium's Education and Community Programs staff.