LeAnn Dourte: ASEE Biomedical Engineering Teaching Award

LeAnn Dourte, a senior lecturer in bioengineering, is the recipient of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Biomedical Engineering Teaching Award, granted annually to recognize contributions in the field of biomedical engineering education by new faculty members.

Dr. Dourte, who earned her PhD in bioengineering from Penn in 2011, will be honored at the Biomedical Engineering Division Awards Banquet in New Orleans, Louisiana, this June.

Benjamin Aaron Garcia: Protein Science Young Investigator Award

Benjamin Aaron Garcia, a Presidential Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, has been selected to receive the 2016 Protein Science Young Investigator Award, given to a scientist who has made an important contribution to the study of proteins within the first eight years of an independent career.

Dr. Garcia will be recognized at the 30th Anniversary Symposium of the Protein Society this July in Baltimore, Maryland, where he will also give a plenary talk. His pioneering research involves developing new mass spectrometry methods and bioinformatic computational tools to examine critical modifications in cellular proteins that alter and control their functions.

Marwan M. Kraidy: Andrew Carnegie Fellowship

Marwan M. Kraidy, the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics & Culture and founding director of the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication (PARGC) at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, is one of 33 new Andrew Carnegie Fellows. Fellows receive funding to pursue one to two years of scholarly research and writing addressing challenges to US democracy and international order.

Dr. Kraidy teaches courses on globalization, culture and revolution, the body in digital culture, contentious publics and the geopolitics of popular culture. He has been studying the use of communications by the Islamic State, whose threat to global security, he argues, is intimately connected to its uses of media and technology.

Ellie Pavlick: Facebook Fellow

Ellie Pavlick, a fourth-year PhD student studying natural language processing in the department of computer & information science in Penn’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, is one of 12 2016-2017 Facebook Fellows. Each winner receives a two-year fellowship that includes payment of tuition and fees, a $37,000 unrestricted grant, opportunities for paid internships and a visit to Facebook’s headquarters to present research. This summer, Ms. Pavlick will intern at Google, where she will work on a project to analyze noun compounds.

Penn Law Women’s Summit Awards & Honorees

Penn Law held its Women’s Summit, “Celebrating Women: From Carrie Kilgore to Today,” in March in Philadelphia. The inaugural Carrie Burnham Kilgore Awards, Summit Awards and Rising Star Awards were presented.

The Carrie Burnham Kilgore Awards

These awards honor trailblazing women leaders whose exemplary careers and/or advocacy have served as catalysts for change.

• Hillary R. Clinton, US Secretary of State, 2008-2012 (New York, NY)

• Safra Catz, W’83, L’86, co-chief executive officer, Oracle Corporation (Redwood City, CA)

The Summit Awards

These awards honor outstanding women leaders whose careers and advocacy at the highest levels inspire and enable the continuing advancement of women.

• Pamela Daley, L’79, senior vice president, General Electric, retired; senior advisor to the chairman, Corporate Business Development

• Hon. Phyllis Kravitch, L’44, senior circuit judge, US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit (Atlanta, GA)

• Ambassador Melanne Verveer, executive director, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security; former US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues (Washington, DC)

• Patricia Viseur Sellers, L’79, special advisor for prosecution strategies to the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court (Brussels, Belgium)

• Mary Jo White, chair, US Securities and Exchange Commission (Washington, DC)

The Rising Star Awards

These awards honor established and future women leaders showing great promise and professional achievements in their first ten years post-graduation.

• Nermeen Arastu, L’08, clinical law professor and supervising attorney, City University of New York School of Law’s Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic (New York, NY)

• Sheila Bapat, L’07, author, Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers’ Rights (San Francisco, CA)

• Linda Shi, L’09, general counsel, 50onRed (Philadelphia, PA)

• Meredith Slawe, L’05, partner, DrinkerBiddle & Reath, LLP (Philadelphia, PA)

Jolyon Baraka Thomas: US-Japan Network for the Future Scholar

Jolyon Baraka Thomas, an assistant professor of Japanese culture, religion and history in the department of East Asian languages & civilizations in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, is one of 12 scholars chosen for the US-Japan Network for the Future.

During this two-year program, Dr. Thomas will participate in a workshop and series of meetings in Washington, DC; a retreat in Montana; a study trip in Japan and a public symposium and panel discussion. The cohort will conduct research, write commentary on policy issues and produce policy papers for publication.

Kimberley Thomas: Nystrom Award for Best Dissertation in Geography

Kimberley Thomas, Gr’15, an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Humanities & Humanistic Social Sciences at Penn, won the American Association of Geographers’ 2016 J. Warren Nystrom award for best dissertation for her paper, Bordering non-water flows: Explaining upstream-downstream power asymmetries in the Ganges Basin.

Dr. Thomas is affiliated with the department of South Asia studies and teaches in the Master of Environmental Studies program. She researches international water politics and human vulnerability to environmental change.

Bethany Wiggin: Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship

Bethany Wiggin, an associate professor and graduate chair of German languages and literatures, affiliate faculty in English and founding director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities, has received a 2016-2017 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship. This award supports faculty in the humanities who embrace public engagement as part of the scholarly vocation. Each Fellow receives a semester of leave to pursue a public-facing project, as well as $10,000 toward project costs.

Dr. Wiggin will use her fellowship for a project called Floating on Warmer Waters. She will explore the complex relationship of people and nature on the Lower Schuylkill River. Based jointly at Bartram’s Garden and at Penn, the project will engage historians, scientists and visual artists to create new programming for the public.

Three Penn Professors: 2016 Guggenheim Fellowships

University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz, music professor Timothy Rommen and theoretical chemist Joseph Subotnik have won John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships. They are among 178 scholars, artists and scientists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants from the US and Canada. The new fellows, announced last month, were chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Dr. Mutz, who has dual appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Annenberg School for Communication, will use her Guggenheim in conjunction with her fall sabbatical to work on a study of American attitudes toward globalization over the next academic year. She teaches and does research on public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior, with an emphasis on political communication. She holds the Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication and serves as the director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics.

Dr. Rommen, a professor of music and Africana studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, specializes in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical theory, ethics, tourism, diaspora and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. He will use his Guggenheim to complete a book, Sounding a Borderless Caribbean: The Creole Geographies of Dominica’s Popular Music.

Dr. Subotnik, an associate professor of chemistry in the School of Arts & Sciences, will use his award to further fundamental understanding of electrochemistry, the study of chemical reactions that involve the transfer of electrons at metal surfaces. These reactions are critical to the operation of catalysts, batteries, photovoltaic cells and many other energy-related devices. He will collaborate with Stanford University’s Todd Martinez, as well as other theorists there, to make faster, more detailed computer simulations of electrochemical reaction dynamics.