Three public lectures were delivered by Wei Lun Visiting Professors to the University in November and December 2001.
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Prof. Louis J. Ignarro, 1998 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, delivered a lecture entitled 'Nitric Oxide in the Regulation of Vascular Function: A Historical Overview' on 23rd November in the Postgraduate Education Centre of the Faculty of Medicine.
In his lecture, Prof. Ignarro explained why the study of nitric oxide allows for an extensive opportunity to develop novel drugs for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of different diseases, many of which are vascular in origin.
Prof. Ignarro studied pharmacology at the University of Columbia and received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1966. In 1986 he first reported that nitric oxide relaxed blood vessels. His findings, combined with contributions from two other scientists, identified nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system. This discovery earned the three of them the 1998 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, and, more importantly, opened doors for the treatment of many diseases in the human cardiovascular system, including hypertension, atherosclerosis, stroke, and coronary heart disease.
Prof. Ignarro is currently the Jerome J. Belzer, MD Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founder and president of the Board of Directors of the Nitric Oxide Society.
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Prof. John W. Meyer, professor of sociology at Stanford University, delivered a public lecture entitled 'Globalization, National Culture, and the Future of the World Polity' in his capacity as Wei Lun Visiting Professor to the University. The lecture took place on 28th November in the Ho Tim Building.
Modern national states and societies arise and change in an active global environment. This environment involves much cultural and organizational material as well as economic exchange and political conflict. Global society is filled with cultural material defining every aspect of the 'proper' national state and society, and with a dense network of organizations promulgating the appropriate models. In his lecture, Prof. Meyer outlined the different kinds of globalizing effects generated by this system.
Prof. Meyer is well known as a founder of and contributor to the institutional theory in modern sociology. This line of work emphasizes the embeddedness of modern social actors, from individuals to organizations and to national states, in wider external cultural models. Thus, in a much cited 1977 paper and in later books, Prof. Meyer depicted modern formal organizations as ritualized celebrations of external cultural rules, more than as coherent action and policy systems. Throughout his career, Prof. Meyer has emphasized empirical research along these lines.
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The third Wei Lun Lecture, entitled 'The Race to Succeed in Marketspace: Lessons from Dot-Com Failures', was delivered by Prof. Vijay Mahajan, John P. Harbin Centennial Chair in Business of the University of Texas at Austin, on 7th December in the Esther Lee Building.
The lecture examined how, in the year 2000, several dot-com retailers filed for bankruptcy, shut down their operations, or faced the risk of their stock being delisted on the stock market. It also discussed whether there were any dot-com winners and if yes, who they were and what they did right that the others didn't. Prof. Mahajan based his discussion on a study conducted in December 2000 and repeated in November 2001.
Prof. Mahajan received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology and his MS in chemical engineering and Ph.D. in management from the University of Texas at Austin. He has researched and written extensively on product diffusion, marketing strategy, and marketing research methodologies. He received the American Marketing Association Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award in 1997, and the AMA Marketing Research Special Interest Group Gilbert Churchill Award in 1999, in recognition of his achievements in marketing research.