The recipients of the awards, which carries with it a cash prize, are Dunster House resident Kathryn Frucher '95 and Leverett House residents Brent J. Foster '97 and Douglas M. Pravda '97, who is a Crimson editor.
"The [winners] are people who deal with their disability in ways that contribute to the community in some special way, either by being inspiring in how they handle their own problems or in things they do for other people or in their spirit," said Associate Registrar Thurston A. Smith.
Smith, director of the Student Disability Resource Center, said the students were nominated by their senior tutors or house masters and selected by a small committee.
Foster, in particular, was singled out by Smith as an especially "extraordinary guy." A history concentrator, Foster is at home in Des Moines, Iowa, on medical leave struggling with cancer.
"Mr. Foster's own struggle with cancer has brought him wide admiration' on campus," Smith said "We were really happy to be able to help his family in this way."
The awards are given each year in memory or Peter H. Wilson '88, who died of cancer in his senior year at Harvard but "possessed a zest for life and a positive approach to his illness which was an inspiration to all who knew him," according to a statement. Jeffrey N. Gell OBITUARY
Harvard Graduate and Zoology Researcher Dies
George William Cottrell Jr. "26, a former researcher associated in ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, died last Thursday at the Riverwoods retirement community in Exeter, N.H. He was 91 and had lived both in Cambridge and Hillsboro, N.H.
From 1931 to 1941 Cottrell served as executive secretary of the Medieval Academy of America, a group of scholars who studied the Middle Ages, and edited its quarterly, Speculum. At the beginning of World War II, Cottrell was recruited into the Office of strategic services and served as chief of biographical records in its Division of Research and Analysis.
A native of Detroit, Cottrell returned to Cambridge in 1943 and was an assistant to William A. Jackson, the first librarian of the newly established Houghton Library.
Cottrell took up the study of birds and volunteered for the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he worked untill 1988. He was a director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and served as an editor of James Lee Peters Checklist of Birds of the World.
Cottrell is survived by his wife of 66 years, Annettee Brinckerhoff Cottrell; a daughter, Annette MerleSmith of Princeton, N.J., and a granddaughter.