Randolph County produced a notable range of figures in the arts and sciences. Poet James Whitcomb Riley had family ties to the county, and as an adult he worked as a sign painter in Union City before becoming Indiana's and the nation's unofficial poet laureate. Chester Burleigh Watts of Winchester became a nationally recognized astronomer with the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and in 1955 received the James Craig Watson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. Ridgeville native Dr. Wendell Meredith Stanley won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 for groundbreaking research studying viruses. Dr. Lowell T. Coggeshall of Saratoga became a world renowned authority on tropical diseases, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and vice president and trustee of the University of Chicago. Winchester native Robert Wise became an Academy Award winning director and producer of films including Westside Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles, and Star Trek, The Movie. Other accomplished people connected to the county included realist painter Roy Barnes; playwright, performer, movie critic, theatrical director, and amateur magician Davey Marlin-Jones; surgeon Dr. Robert Painter, who played an instrumental role in the world's first successful heart transplant; director and producer Pamela Hill, who held leading roles with NBC News, ABC News, and Cable News Network and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; award winning poet and essayist John Taggart; musician Randy Jo Hobbs, a founding member of The McCoys who later performed and recorded with Jimi Hendrix, Edgar Winter, and Rick Derringer; Dr. David Stump, who oversaw research that led to drug therapy successfully treating Lupus and other autoimmune diseases; and writer, producer, and director L. Marlene King, whose work included Now and Then, set in a fictional Midwest town based on Winchester.