Claire M. Fagin, an educator and advocate for change in the profession of nursing, died Jan. 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Dr. Fagin was named dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. During her tenure, she tripled the enrollment, established a doctoral program in nursing, and built Penn into a widely acknowledged world leader in nursing research and education. In 2006, Penn renamed its Nursing Education Building the Claire M. Fagin Nursing Sciences Building

Dr. Fagin was later the founding director of the John A. Hartford Foundation’s national program on geriatric nursing. She was also chair of the advisory board that turned a $100 million grant into the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis, which focuses on master’s and doctoral programs in nursing.

In spite of her advanced degrees, her prominent academic positions and honorary degrees and other awards, Dr. Fagin always made a point of identifying herself as a nurse. Her mother would say that her daughter was not, as she put it “a real nurse.” Dr. Fagin would say, “Mama, I’m an R.N. That’s what it means — Real Nurse.”

Tanya Berezin, artistic director of the Circle Repertory Theater, died Nov. 29 in San Francisco, at 82.

She began her theater career as a stage actress, gaining glowing reviews  for her Off Broadway performances over the years, and she won an Obie Award for her role in Lanford Wilson’s play, “The Mound Builders” in 1975. In 1986, she turned her attention to behind-the-scenes activity, and joined the repertory theater she had helped to found in 1969.

Her goal was to bring more imaginative work to the theater company, and during her tenure as artistic director, she offered plays about AIDS, capitalism and complex family relationships.

She also acted in television dramas, like “St. Elsewhere” and “The Equalizer,” and also in films, including “Awakenings,” with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in non-verbal communication, and in what he called “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle and often unconscious gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, CA. He was 90.

Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work on what he called the Pygmalion effect, concluding that performance is enhanced when given positive reinforcement.

In addition to his work on interpersonal expectations, Dr. Rosenthal was a pioneer in meta-analysis, in which he developed a framework for combining multiple studies of the same phenomenon to reach better results.

Nancy E. Adler, a health psychologist whose work helped transform the public understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic status and physical health, died on Jan. 4 at her home in San Francisco. She was 77.

Dr. Adler was instrumental in documenting the role that education, income and self-perceived status in society play in predicting health and longevity. Today the connection is well known among public health experts that life expectancy is determined more by zip code than genetic code. But it was an obscure notion as recently as 30 years ago.

Zvika Klein has been named the new chief editor of the Jerusalem Post, succeeding Avi Mayer. Klein has been the newspaper’s Diaspora Affairs correspondent and deputy editor-in-chief.

Previously, Klein, an Israeli-American, had been for 10 years the Diaspora Affairs reporter for the Makor Rishon newspaper.

Former U.S. Secretary of State and national security advisor Henry Kissinger, arguably one of the most influential and also controversial foreign policy figures of our time, died Nov. 29 at the age of 100.

His policies and strategies under former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford brought widespread attention, both positive and negative, that changed the course of American history.

Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to arrange the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War, and is credited with secret diplomacy that helped Nixon open communist China to the U.S. and the West. But he was also reviled by many over the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and accused by critics of needlessly expanding the conflict.

Kissinger escaped Nazi Germany in his youth and came to the U.S. in 1938 before ultimately cementing his legacy in foreign policy in the 1970s.

Writer-producer Norman Lear, who revolutionized American comedy with such daring and immensely popular early-‘70s sitcoms as “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son,” died Dec. 5 in his home in Los Angeles. He was 101.

Lear’s shows were the first to address the serious political cultural and social flashpoints of the day — racism, abortion, homosexuality, the Vietnam War — by working new wrinkles into the standard domestic comedy formula. No subject was taboo. Their fresh outrageousness turned them into huge ratings successes. “Family” accounted for six spin-offs, was honored with four Emmys in 1971-73, and a 1977 Peabody Award for Lear “for giving us comedy with a social conscience.”

Some of Lear’s other creations played with TV conventions. “One Day at a Time” (1975-84) featured a single mother of two young girls, a new concept for a sitcom. “Diff’rent Strokes” (1978-86) followed the growing pains of two Black kids adopted by a wealthy white businessman.