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Honors & Other Things |
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February 10, 2015, Volume 61, No. 22 |
Firooz Aflatouni: Franklin Key Award
Firooz Aflatouni, Skirkanich Assistant Professor in the department of electrical & systems engineering, is the recipient of the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Key Award from the IEEE Philadelphia.
The Key Award is given annually to an engineer in the Philadelphia section of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers) for outstanding technical innovation and technological contributions that have significant practical application. The award emphasizes technical innovation, a significant improvement to the design or application of a system or patents of clear practical values.
Emphasis is placed on tangible technical and technological achievements that demonstrate intellectual, industrial, economical or human benefits.
Dr. Aflatouni’s research interests include high speed integrated circuits, electronic-photonic co-design and silicon photonics with applications in imaging, sensing, communications, Radar, LIDAR and biotechnology.
IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence.
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Dawn Bonnell and Nader Engheta: MRS Fellows
Dawn Bonnell, Henry Towne Professor in the department of materials science & engineering, and Nader Engheta, H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor in the department of electrical & systems engineering, have been named 2015 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fellows.
The fellowship honors those MRS members who are notable for their distinguished research accomplishments and their outstanding contributions to the advancement of materials research worldwide. The distinction is highly selective with the maximum number of new Fellow appointments each year being limited to 0.2% of the current MRS regular membership.
Dr. Bonnell’s research explores the fundamental basis of property variations at atomic scales in complex materials, exploiting these variations to make functional systems.
Dr. Engheta’s research interests span the fields of nanooptics and nanophotonics, metamaterials and plasmonics and optical nanostructures, including nanoantennas, nanocircuits and nanosystems. Dr. Engheta is also investigating bio-inspired sensing and imaging as well as physics and reverse-engineering of polarization vision in nature.
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Debi Page Ferrarello: Nightingale Award
Debi Page Ferrarello, director of Family Education and Lactation at Pennsylvania Hospital (PAH), recently earned the 25th annual Nightingale Award of Pennsylvania for Community Nursing.
Ms. Ferrarello is responsible for program development, implementation and evaluation of the hospital’s Lactation Program and Childbirth Education. She oversees the hospital’s specialty boutique located in the community, which caters to new moms and cancer survivors. She creates and facilitates interdepartmental task forces to tackle problems and directs an innovative lactation consultation internship program. A published researcher and author with more than 20 years’ experience, she is also the team leader for the hospital’s Baby-Friendly journey to create an optimal environment for infant feeding and mother-baby bonding.
Ms. Ferrarello, who is also an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, spearheaded change processes for staff, physicians, mothers and families to provide care that promotes breastfeeding and supports breast and bottle feeding mothers, in order to create an optimal environment for infant feeding and mother-baby bonding. She also led PAH through the performance improvement odyssey that makes the hospital eligible to achieve Baby-Friendly status.
Her efforts primarily contributed to PAH being chosen as one of 90 hospitals across the country to participate in a $6 million grant to help hospitals achieve Baby-Friendly status through performance improvement.
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Ira Harkavy: Ernest L. Boyer Award for Lifetime of Work
Ira Harkavy, the associate vice president and founding director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, was honored with the fifth annual Ernest L. Boyer Award during the annual Association of American Colleges & Universities meeting last month in Washington, DC.
Awarded by New American Colleges & Universities, a consortium of private, comprehensive colleges that are grounded in the liberal arts tradition, the award honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to higher education.
Dr. Harkavy was selected for his pioneering work in university-community partnerships and the civic engagement of students and faculty.
As an undergraduate student at Penn in the 1960s, Dr. Harkavy studied history so that he could better understand and ultimately help change the world. Under his leadership, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships has grown into a model for universities around the world.
The Netter Center now focuses on two primary approaches that allow Penn to connect with the West Philadelphia community: academically based community service (ABCS) courses and university-assisted community school partnerships.
ABCS courses are a form of service learning that focus on real world problem solving, such as those related to poverty, education and health care. These integrate learning, community service, teaching and research. Today, there are 26 departments at Penn that offer 65 academically based community service courses to 1,800 participating students each year.
The Netter Center also works with five university-assisted community schools that serve nearly 4,000 children and their families. Currently, it is working to replicate this model with three regional centers in Connecticut, Indiana and Oklahoma.
After receiving his award, Dr. Harkavy lectured on Creating the Connected Institution: Toward Realizing Benjamin Franklin’s and Ernest Boyer’s Revolutionary Vision for American Higher Education.
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Kathryn Hellerstein: National Jewish Book Award
The Jewish Book Council has named Kathryn Hellerstein, associate professor of Yiddish in the department of Germanic languages and literatures in Penn Arts & Sciences the recipient of the 2014 Barbara Dobkin Award for Women’s Studies for her A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 (Stanford University Press, 2014).
The National Jewish Book Awards highlight the best new English-language Jewish books and their authors in a range of categories.
Her books include Anthology of Women Yiddish Poets (forthcoming), In New York: A Selection (translations of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern) and Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. She is co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. Her many scholarly articles on Yiddish literature and, most recently, Yiddish literature about China are published in journals, anthologies and encyclopedias.
Dr. Hellerstein has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn.
The Jewish Book Council awards will be presented on March 11 at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
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More Accolades for the Inn at Penn
The Inn at Penn recently was recognized by Hilton with two of the organization’s highest awards. The hotel was honored with the “Highest Property Loyalty” (customer satisfaction) award for all Hilton Hotels in The Americas. The Inn at Penn also received the “Genius-of-the-And” award for meeting or exceeding all of its performance metrics in categories such as service, quality and market share to name a few.
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Joshua Plotkin: Akira Okubo Prize for Mathematical Biology
Joshua Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania has been named winner of the 2015 Akira Okubo Prize, awarded jointly by the International Society for Mathematical Biology and the Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology. The award committee granted the award with “great enthusiasm,” noting that, “Plotkin’s research achievements belie his young age.”
The prize is given every other year, alternately to a senior scientist for lifetime achievement, and, as is the case this year, to a junior scientist younger than 40. The award honors scientists “for outstanding and innovative theoretical work, for establishing superb conceptual ideas, for solving tough theoretical problems and/or for uniting theory and data to advance biological science.” Dr. Plotkin was judged to “amply satisfy” these criteria.
Dr. Plotkin is a professor with joint appointments in the department of biology in Penn Arts & Sciences and in the department of computer & information science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science. His research employs mathematics to address biological questions on topics as varied as language acquisition, DNA repair, distribution of tropical trees and social behavior. His theoretical work on the evolution of the influenza virus has important implications for public health, including vaccine design.
The Prize was created to honor the memory of Akira Okubo, a mathematician, ecologist and oceanographer. It comes with a cash prize and plaque. In addition, as an award winner, Dr. Plotkin will give two lectures this summer, one at the Society for Mathematical Biology Annual Conference in Atlanta this June and another at the Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology Annual Conference in Kyoto in August.
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Dorothy Roberts: APA’s Fuller Award
The American Psychiatric Association has named Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, the recipient of the 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award in recognition of her demonstrated leadership and exceptional achievements.
The award honors “a Black citizen who has pioneered in an area which has significantly benefitted the quality of life for Black people.”
Professor Roberts is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law who joined the University in 2012 as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. Her appointment is shared between the School of Law and the departments of sociology and Africana studies in Penn Arts & Sciences. She is also the founding director of Penn’s Program on Race, Science and Society.
Professor Roberts’ path-breaking work explains the mechanisms and consequences of racial inequities for women, children, families and communities and counters scientific misunderstandings about racial identity. Her research focuses on family, criminal and civil-rights law; bioethics; child welfare; feminist theory; reproductive justice; critical race theory; and science and society.
Her major books include Fatal Intervention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Sex, Power and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty.
Professor Roberts will receive the award and deliver the Fuller Award lecture at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, in Toronto in May.
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Penn Made President: Clayton Rose
Clayton Rose, who received a master’s in 2005 and a PhD in 2007, both in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed the 15th president of Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine. He is currently a faculty member at Harvard Business School where he teaches and writes on the responsibilities of leadership and managerial values. He will begin his presidency on July 1. Dr. Rose was selected for the Bowdoin presidency following an eight-month international search.
For more Penn Made Presidents see www.upenn.edu/almanac/pennpres.html
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Top Ten: Sociology
The University of Pennsylvania’s department of sociology was recently ranked tenth based on College Factual’s ranking methodology according to College USA Today (December 27, 2014). They noted, “The sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania is one of the oldest and most distinguished departments in the country. Penn focuses on close interaction between faculty and students, which fosters discussions and a more comprehensive understanding of the sociology field. In addition to coursework, Penn hosts a weekly colloquial series along with workshops and research clusters to help students discover specific sociological topics of interest to them.
The undergraduate program works to explain human behavior by focusing on social phenomena on a large scale. Students learn concepts and theories, which opens the possibility of pursuing a career in a number of fields. Penn graduates earn the highest average salaries of any on this list, with mid-career salaries of $88,000” (Salary data provided by PayScale).
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Thomas Sollecito and Eric Stoopler: AAOM Awards
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Eric Stoopler and Thomas Sollecito |
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Two members of Penn Dental Medicine’s department of oral medicine are being recognized for their contributions to the field by the American Academy of Oral Medicine (AAOM). Thomas Sollecito, professor and chair, department of oral medicine, is the 2015 recipient of the AAOM’s Abraham Reiner Diamond Pin Award, and Eric Stoopler, associate professor of oral medicine and director of the oral medicine residency program, is this year’s recipient of the Herschfus Memorial Award.
The Abraham Reiner Diamond Pin Award—the highest award presented by the AAOM—recognizes unusual, exceptional and dedicated service to the Academy. Dr. Sollecito, who has been a member of the AAOM since 1991, served as president of the AAOM Board of Trustees in 2010 and remains an active member of the Board.
The Herschfus Memorial Award recognizes both service to the AAOM and the field of oral medicine. Dr. Stoopler, who presently serves as Secretary of the Academy, has been a member of the AAOM since 1999. He also serves on the Executive Committee, is a member of the Board of Trustees and is the Chair of the Program Directors Committee, comprised of all accredited oral medicine residency programs in North America.
Both Dr. Sollecito and Dr. Stoopler earned their DMD degrees and postdoctoral certificates in oral medicine from Penn Dental Medicine and have been on the school’s oral medicine faculty since 1993 and 2002, respectively.
The awards will be presented at the AAOM Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, in April. The AAOM, founded in 1945, is a membership organization representing the discipline of oral medicine. The Academy is a sponsor of the American Board of Oral Medicine, which is responsible for examining and certifying candidates who have received approved postdoctoral training in the specialty. |
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Almanac -
February 10, 2015, Volume 61, No. 22
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