Honors & Other Things |
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February 25, 2014, Volume 60, No. 24 |
Gates Cambridge Scholar: Ms. Davey
Inaugural Faculty Award of Merit: Dr. Meleis
Three Penn Researchers Awarded Sloan Fellowships
Global Engagement Fund Awards
ISLS Board: Dr. Yoon
Gates Cambridge Scholar: Ms. Davey
University of Pennsylvania senior Sonya Davey has been awarded a 2014 Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
She is among 40 American students awarded Gates Cambridge scholarships this year and is the 24th Gates Cambridge Scholar from Penn since the program began in 2001.
Ms. Davey, of Gaithersburg, MD, is majoring in global health and societies, South Asian studies and biology at Penn. In addition to being a certified EMT, she has conducted fieldwork in India focused on women’s health, specifically female feticide or sex-selective abortion and conducted undergraduate research in colorectal cancer as an intern at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.
Ms. Davey started a social venture called Ultrasafe Ultrasound, designed to curb female feticide through innovative ultrasound technology that automatically blurs the genitals in ultrasound images.
Ms. Davey has a passion for languages. She speaks and writes Hindi, Gujarati and Sanskrit, has studied Latin and is studying Telugu. Her long-term goals include becoming a physician-anthropologist and opening an obstetric clinic in India.
Inaugural Faculty Award of Merit: Dr. Meleis
Dr. Afaf I. Meleis, the Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing, has been named the first recipient of the Faculty Award of Merit presented by Penn Alumni. This annual award was established by Penn Alumni and the Office of the Provost to recognize faculty who have made an outstanding contribution to alumni education and engagement at Penn by sharing their unique scholarship work with the alumni community. Dean Meleis was nominated by alumni and fellow colleagues for her dedication to engaging both Penn Nursing alumni and the larger Penn alumni community with the University as their intellectual home. The award will be presented on February 28 at the Penn Alumni Volunteer Leadership Retreat Dinner.
Three Penn Researchers Awarded Sloan Fellowships
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Three University of Pennsylvania faculty members are among this year’s Sloan Fellowship recipients. Since 1955, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has granted yearly fellowships to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders.
Penn’s 2014 Sloan Fellows are:
Dr. Danielle S. Bassett, assistant professor of bioengineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science—Dr. Bassett’s laboratory uses tools from complex systems and network science to study the structure and dynamics of the human brain at the level of large-scale neural circuitry. Akin to social networks in Facebook and Twitter, regions of the brain form a network of mutually interconnected components that process, transmit and store information. The end goals are to identify organizational principles, to develop novel diagnostics of disease and to design personalized therapeutics for rehabilitation and treatment of brain injury, neurological disease and psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Chris Callison-Burch, assistant professor of computer and information science, School of Engineering and Applied Science—Understanding the shared meaning between certain expressions comes naturally to humans but remains a major challenge for machines. To a computer, the phrases “thrown in jail” and “locked up” have nothing in common, so Dr. Callison-Burch and his colleagues are developing a database of phrase pairs to be used as the basis for algorithms that understand human language. Gleaned from documents ranging from scientific abstracts to movie dialog that have been translated from one language to another, this database could help computers better understand different linguistic contexts and converse with people in a more natural way.
Dr. Alison Sweeney, assistant professor of physics, School of Arts and Sciences—Dr. Sweeney is trained as a biologist but works in Penn’s department of physics and astronomy as part of the School of Arts and Sciences’ Evolution Cluster. She studies a reflective protein that squid, giant clams and other sea life have put to a variety of uses, such as for camouflage or for growing symbiotic algae within their bodies. Her research is focused on the interplay between the physics of the biological structures formed with this protein and the role they play in animals’ evolutionary history.
“For more than half a century, the Sloan Foundation has been proud to honor the best young scientific minds and support them during a crucial phase of their careers when early funding and recognition can really make a difference,” said Paul L. Joskow, president of the Foundation. “These researchers are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge in unprecedented ways.”
To qualify, candidates must be nominated by their peers and selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Each Fellow receives a two-year, $50,000 award to further his or her research. |
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Global Engagement Fund Awards
Penn Global is proud to announce seven awards from the Global Engagement Fund for the 2013-2014 academic year. This fund is designed primarily to support projects that collaborate across Schools and disciplines; involve multiple faculty members; and engage regions in which Penn has active academic partnerships and collaborative ventures.
This year’s awards will support projects across Penn’s Schools and will provide the opportunity for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff to study, research or teach in Belgium, Botswana, China and India, as well as here in the United States.
The following are the 2013-2014 Global Engagement Fund Award recipients:
• Shyamkrishna Balganesh (Law), Jacques deLisle (Law, SAS):Comparative Regulation: A Study of Regulatory Strategies in India and China
• Jacques deLisle (Law, SAS):Global Research Seminar: China’s Approach to International Law
• Robert Gross (PSOM), Carrie Kovarik (PSOM), Elizabeth Lowenthal (PSOM), Nancy Hanrahan (Nursing), Dolores Albarracin (ASC): Real-Time Wireless Tracking of Pharmacy Refill Data
• Walter Licht (SAS): Penn-Leuven Faculty Exchange: Teaching Modern American History and American Economic History in Belgium
• Lisa Mitchell (SAS), Raili Roy (SAS), Pushkar Sohoni (Penn Libraries): Undergraduate Research & Cultural Immersion Experiences in India
• Dipti Pitta (VET), Zhengxia Dou (VET), James Ferguson (VET), Dave Galligan (VET), Elizabeth Grice (PSOM), Brian Spooner (SAS): A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Improve the Socio-economic Status of Smallholder Livestock Farmers in Rural India
• Monroe Price (ASC), Joseph Turow (ASC), Marwan Kraidy (ASC):The Global Implications of Mobile Media
Longer descriptions of each of these projects, as well as more information about the Global Engagement Fund, can be found at https://global.upenn.edu/gef
ISLS Board: Dr. Yoon
Dr. Susan Yoon, associate professor in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education’s Teaching, Learning and Leadership Division, has been elected to a five-year term on the governing board of directors of the International Society of Learning Sciences (ISLS). ISLS brings together those interested in learning experiences across schools, homes, workplaces and communities and who seek to understand how knowledge, tools, networks and social structures enable collaboration and learning.
Among other projects, Dr. Yoon will be involved in selecting venues around the world to host the International Conference for the Learning Sciences and the International Conference for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.
She has also been invited to serve as associate editor for the Journal of Learning Sciences, one of the two flagship journals published by ISLS. Her term began in January.
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