New York, NY, May 6, 2005 – The Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education presented a total of $45,000 in grants at its April luncheon, held this year at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York during Lightfair International.
For the first time the Fund presented an award in its New Grant Option category which was created to allow the Fund to consider ideas which do not fall into its traditional categories. This grant, for $20,000, was given to Jill Mulholland, PhD candidate and instructor at Texas A&M University. She will explore the concept that light and place can be identified, captured and reproduced, and will incorporate into her class the results of her study of their integral relationship.
Two $10,000 Edison Price Fellowships, presented to help educators further their own lighting education, were given this year. Professor Dorothy Fowles, director of the interior design program at Iowa State University, will participate in a summer internship at the firm of Shuler Shook Lighting Designers in Chicago, Il. Laura Prestwood, assistant professor at Texas Christian University, will serve as a summer intern at the Lighting Design Alliance in Long Beach, CA.
The $5,000 Jonas Bellovin Scholar Achievement Award was presented for the third time. Established as a reward to a student who has demonstrated outstanding performance in a lighting program, it was shared this year by two students from The Lighting Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Kenneth Appleman and Alexander Baker each received $2,500.
A moving tribute to Lesley Wheel, one of the Fund’s founding board members, was a major feature of the luncheon program. In his remarks, Fund president Jeffrey Milham described Ms. Wheel as “a person of ‘ideas,’ and it’s amazing to think about just how many ‘ideas’ she had and how far she took them.” He noted that, without her, the Nuckolls Fund simply would not exist today. To date, the Fund has received a total of $16,500 in contributions in her memory.
Since 1989, the Nuckolls Fund has awarded a total of $400,000 to support lighting education, and its endowment is now over $1 million. Mr. Milham noted that it is completely as a result of the generosity of the Fund’s contributors that such progress is possible, and he cited several of the Fund’s major contributors. B-K Lighting has taken over sponsorship of the Fund’s annual Fun Run/Walk. The Designers Lighting Forum presented a check at the luncheon for $5,000, bringing total DLF contributions to over $50,000. The recent contribution was given in memory of Sidney Feltman and Lesley Wheel. The New York Section of the Illuminating Engineering Society presented a check for $4,000 in memory of Timothy Pike and Lesley Wheel. NY Section contributions now total $47,000. Nulux Lighting recently contributed $10,000 for a total of $45,000 in memory of Edison Price.
The speaker at this year’s luncheon was Jonathan Speirs, principal director of Speirs and Major Associates, a lighting design firm with offices in London and Edinburgh. Mr. Speirs gave an illustrated presentation about the inspiration behind the “Made of Light” exhibition designed by his firm, which is currently touring design centers in Europe. He also showed how his firm communicates their conceptual ideas to clients with examples of their work in Europe and the Middle East.