It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Laurence Coderre. Laurence died peacefully on January 8, 2026, at home in Binghamton, NY with her parents by her side. She was 41 years old. The cause was complications of a congenital hypomyelinating neuropathy.
Laurence Coderre was born on July 30, 1984 at BMP Hospital in Cowansville, Québec, the only child of Shirley Smith and Jacques Coderre. Precocious, Laurence started off bilingual in her native French and English and would eventually master Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. She attended Knowlton Academy, where...
Alma Lowell Dittmer, a professor and writer who worked at UC Berkeley for 40 years and specialized in Chinese politics, died on April 15 in Oakland. He was 82.
He was named after his father Alma, but throughout his life went by his middle name, Lowell. His parents Alma and Veda met when they themselves were both teachers at a junior high school in Utah. They would both spend much of their life teaching; Alma as a university professor of music; his wife as a K-12 teacher with specialties in Home Economics and Remedial Reading. Lowell was the eldest of their six children, and they...
John Jamieson received his BA, MA and Ph.D. at Berkeley. Professor of Oriental Languages, he also lived abroad for long periods of time, serving as the Director of the Stanford University Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, and as academic advisor to the United States Embassy in Beijing, China, In 1971, he participated in what was then known as "Ping...
Agassiz Professor of Chinese emeritus Pang-hsin Ting 丁邦新 passed away on January 30, 2023. Professor Ting, an internationally renowned linguist, was professor of Chinese linguistics at UC Berkeley from 1989 until 1994. He then moved to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he served as Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.Professor Ting's research made lasting contributions to historical tonal reconstruction as well as the classification of Chinese dialects. His works on Sino-Tibetan linguistics and Austronesian languages remain major references for scholars...
