In Memoriam

    (Picture #2: Left:Gian Sahota. Right: Muhammad Yunus)

GIAN SINGH SAHOTA (1924-2010)
PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS

“A colleague who guided the program [GPED] in its formative years. . . a mainstay at all times.”  James S. Worley (1988)

Gian Sahota was born on July 22, 1924, and died in Princeton, New Jersey on November 20, 2010 at the age of 86. He received M.A. in Economics from Leeds University in the United Kingdom in 1957 and then returned to India as a Junior Fellow at the prestigious Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi and promptly published his first book entitled Indian Tax Structure and Economic Development which gave rise to several studies on the same topic in other countries.  From 1961 to 1964, he was at the University of Chicago pursuing Ph.D. in Economics.  His Ph.D. dissertation: Fertilizer in Economic Development was published by Praeger in 1968.

Professor Sahota came to Vanderbilt University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics in the Graduate Program in Economic Development (GPED) in the summer of 1964.  He spent the next 24 years at Vanderbilt, becoming associate professor in 1967 and full professor in 1970.  In the mid-1960s, after joining the Vanderbilt Economics Department, he traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil with other Economics faculty including Andrea Maneschi, Bill Thweatt, Werner Baer and Doug Graham to set up a Master’s program in economics at the University of Sao Paulo.  This program became one of Vanderbilt’s best known foreign programs and continues to thrive today as a domestic program which now offers the Ph.D. degree as well.
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RENDIGS FELS (1917-2010)
PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS

Ren Fels was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 11, 1917 and died in Nashville, Tennessee on January 24, 2010. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from Columbia University before serving in the U.S. Army in the Second World War. After the war, Fels returned to Harvard where he earned his Ph.D. in 1948. He accepted his first (and only) permanent academic appointment at Vanderbilt University in 1948, retiring in 1982.
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WILLIAM OLIVER THWEATT (1921-2008)
PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS

William Oliver Thweatt, Professor Emeritus of Economics, known to his colleagues as “Bill”, died on February 28, 2008, at the age of 86 after being ill for about a year. Bill was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 4, 1921. He spent a difficult childhood since his father died in a car accident when he was six, and when he was ten, his mother died of tuberculosis. By then the Great Depression had started. Bill was shuttled among the households of relatives from New York to Alabama until he was 18, attending four high schools in three states. When World War Two broke out, Bill enlisted in the Navy’s V-12 program and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Through the Officers’ Training Program, he began studying at Berea College, Kentucky, and the University of North Carolina. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Management in 1946 at UCLA, and stayed there to earn the M. A. degree in Economics in 1948.
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