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Date: January 13, 2000
Eggleston, Tien to Receive Alumni Honors
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Forrest Eggleston '42 and Chang Lin Tien *59 will receive Princeton University's top alumni honors and deliver addresses on campus on Alumni Day, February 26.
Eggleston, a medical doctor who served for 33 years as a missionary in India, will receive the Woodrow Wilson Award, which is given each year to an undergraduate alumnus or alumna whose career embodies the call to duty in Wilson's famous speech, "Princeton in the Nation's Service." Tien, professor and former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the Madison Medal. Named for Princeton's first graduate student, James Madison, this medal is given each year to an alumnus or alumna of the Graduate School who has had a distinguished career, advanced the cause of education or achieved an outstanding record of public service.
At 9:15 a.m. Tien will speak on "Innovation and Technology in the New Global Economy." At 10:30 a.m. Eggleston will give a talk entitled "A Tiger Goes to India: A Surgeon Reflects." Both talks will be open to the public in Alexander Hall.
Wilson Award Winner
Eggleston, who majored in physics at Princeton, went to Cornell Medical School and graduated in 1945. After eight years of training in surgery, including two years in the U.S. Navy, he went to India as a Presbyterian missionary. For a year he ran a small tuberculosis hospital in the foothills of the Himalayas, then became professor and head of the department of surgery at the Christian Medical College and its associated hospital in Ludhiana, in the Punjab. During his last four years there, he was director of the institution.
Before he retired in 1986, Eggleston was responsible for training more than 100 surgeons. Both in his missionary and his medical work, he was aided by his wife Barbara, who was a nurse in the tuberculosis hospital and later administrative head of a school with more than a thousand students. After leaving India, the couple served as volunteers in Cameroon.
They now live in Mechanicsburg, Pa., where Eggleston is a full-time volunteer with the Medical Benevolence Foundation. In 1999 he published his memoir, Where Is God Not? An American Surgeon in India.
Madison Medalist
Born in China, Tien graduated from National Taiwan University and came to the United States in 1956. He earned an MA at the University of Louisville before coming to Princeton, where he received MA and PhD degrees in 1959, the same year he joined the mechanical engineering faculty at Berkeley. In 1988 he went to the University of California, Irvine, where he was executive vice chancellor and UCI Distinguished Professor for two years.
Returning to Berkeley in 1990, Tien served for seven years as Berkeley's seventh chancellor and held the Martin Berlin chair in mechanical engineering. He is now University Professor for the University of California system and NEC Distinguished Professor at Berkeley. Internationally known for his work in heat transfer technology, he was the 1981 recipient of the Max Jakob Memorial Award.
A naturalized U.S. citizen, Tien has been active in the Pacific Council on International Policy, Council on Foreign Relations and other organizations dedicated to enhancing communications between East and West and promoting democracy.
He was recently appointed to the U.S. National Science Board and the U.S. National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century and is co-chair of the National Commission on Asia in the Schools.