Two noted graduates of the Valley Stream High School District returned to their alma maters this month to receive Distinguished Alumni Awards from their school, the student body, their alumni association and local governmental officials in all school assemblies to which the community was invited.

Honored with a Distinguished Alumni Award was nationally-known breast cancer investigator Dr. Larry Norton.

Dr. Norton, who grew up on Brown Street in Valley Stream, attended Shaw Avenue Elementary School, and graduated from Central High School in the Class of 1964, is director of the Evelyn Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan; head of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering; a professor of medicine at Weil Medical College of Cornell University; and a new member of the National Cancer Advisory Board. He is doctor to many celebrity patients across the country and supervises breast cancer researchers nationwide.

Graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude with a BA in psychology from the University of Rochester in 1968, he received his MD from Columbia University and took his post-doctoral training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. He sits on innumerable boards and has published scores of articles in the field of oncology.

After the awards assembly, Dr. Norton met in a small group setting with students interested in medical and scientific fields.

Receiving a Distinguished Alumni Award was also Edith Lederer, chief of AP correspondent at the United Nations. Ms. Lederer, who grew up on Byron Avenue in Franklin Square and attended Willow Road Elementary School, is a 1960 graduate of North High School.

Just posted to the United States in the past year, Edith Lederer has enjoyed a 33-year career with the Associated Press, working on every continent except Antarctica while covering the world's major wars, famines, nuclear issues and political upheavals.

The first woman assigned full-time to the AP staff during the Vietnam War and the first woman to head an AP foreign bureau (she was named bureau chief in Peru in 1975), she also covered the 1973 Middle East war, the 1979 war in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the end of the war in Bosnia, the civil war in Somalia, and the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda.

During her 16-year assignment in London in the 1980's and 1990's, she traveled throughout the world, reporting on the downfall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the crash of Pan Am Flight 103, the death of Princess Diana, international security issues, and major United Nations conferences on population and women.

A 1963 graduate, with distinction, of Cornell University, she earned her MA in communications from Stanford University in 1964 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

After the awards assembly, Ms. Lederer met with students interested in journalism and international careers.