Celebrating the Life of Helen Carr Peake
alumnus creates new fund for student excellence
2003 February Issue 2

Dr. Sheldon Pang, an RLE alumnus, has established the Helen Carr Peake Memorial Fund in RLE. Helen Peake, the wife of RLE principal investigator William T. Peake, Professor of Electrical and Bioengineering, passed away last year. Pang’s gift honors the memory of Helen Peake and commemorates the profound influence of the Peakes on his education and professional development.

The fund will support an annual prize for outstanding bioengineering research by an MIT undergraduate or graduate student doing research in RLE or the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory (EPL) at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.The award will be known as the Helen Carr Peake Research Prize.

Pang is Senior Vice President of AIG Trading Group, Inc., a member company of American International Group, Inc. He conducted his doctoral research in RLE and EPL as a member of the RLE Auditory Physiology Group, receiving his doctorate from MIT in 1988.

RLE’s Director Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Julius A. Stratton Professor of Electrical Engineering, expressed the Laboratory’s appreciation of Pang’s generous gift.“Professor Peake, who was a member of Dr. Pang’s doctoral committee and an important intellectual influence in his graduate studies, and his wife Helen opened their home and their hearts to generations of graduate students. This was certainly the case with Dr. Pang when he was a student,” noted Shapiro. “Mrs. Peake succumbed last year to a long illness.That her many contributions to the RLE and EPL community will be memorialized through an annual prize is, in my view, a very fitting tribute to a woman who helped so many students thrive here at MIT and after graduation.”

Contributions to the fund are welcome. Please consider joining the many friends of RLE who have added their donations to that of Dr. Pang. All gifts are placed into perpetual MIT endowment, with income from the endowment funding the Prize.

Checks should be made payable to “MIT/Peake Memorial Fund,” and submitted to the address below:

The Office of Memorial Gifts
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room E19-439
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307

Prospective donors with questions may contact William Smith, Assistant Director for Finance and Sponsor Relations, at 617.253.5621 or whs@mit.edu.