Alumni News

Marco Deyasi (Art, Art History & Visual Studies Ph.D., ‘07) presented “Ethnographic Sculpture and the Complexities of Race: The Cultural Politics of Charles Cordier, Theodore Riviere, and Auguste Rodin,” as part of a panel on Sculpture and Race, 1750-Present, at the annual conference of the College Art Association, February 2010.

Kevin Joseph Edgar (Chemistry Ph.D., ’79) was honored by the American Chemical Society of Fellows for excellence in chemistry and service to society.

Laurel Frederickson (Art, Art History & Visual Studies Ph.D., ‘07) had her article, “Trapped: Kate Millett, Japan, Fluxus, and Feminism,” included in the “Women & Fluxus” issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory , Volume 19, Issue 3, November 2009. The essay is drawn from her dissertation.

Randall F. Grass (Education M.A.T. ’75) has published Great Spirits: Portraits of Life-Changing World Music Artists (University Press of Mississippi).

Dan L. Hendricks (Religion Ph.D., ’77) has been appointed vice chancellor for advancement at Purdue University-Calumet.

Jairy C. Hunter (Education Ph.D., ’77) was awarded the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor.

Bryce Johnson (Slavic Languages and Literature Ph.D., ‘00), an assistant professor of English, foreign language, and humanities at Neumann University is also an exhibiting artist and choral director. Dr. Johnson’s teaching and research interests are wide-ranging, from Russian grammar to Peircean semiotics and historical linguistics to aesthetics. He has presented academic papers on these subjects from Salt Lake to Scotland.

David Jones (History A.M., ’70) was awarded the Sniffen Faculty Governance Service Award from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in September.

Carrie Levesque (Slavic Languages and Literature Ph.D., ‘03) is a full-time Lecturer in the Department of German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese Studies, UNC-Greensboro and is on the teaching faculty for women’s studies. Professor Levesque regularly teaches “Women, War, and Terror,” an online course based on her dissertation for UNCG’s Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies.

Michael S. Mayer (History A.M., ’75) has written Presidential Profiles: The Eisenhower Years, Oxford University Press.

Edward Shanken (Art, Art History & Visual Studies Ph.D., ‘09) published his book, Art and Electronic Media, (2009) in the Themes and Movements series by Phaidon Press.

Phillip E. Wegner (Literature Ph.D., ’93) has published Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2009: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Duke University Press).

Marco Deyasi (Art, Art History & Visual Studies Ph.D., ‘07) presented “Ethnographic Sculpture and the Complexities of Race: The Cultural Politics of Charles Cordier, Theodore Riviere, and Auguste Rodin,” as part of a panel on Sculpture and Race, 1750-Present, at the annual conference of the College Art Association, February 2010. Kevin Joseph Edgar (Chemistry Ph.D., […] pbess pakis.bessias@duke.edu order => 2. sidebar => 1251 Student & Faculty Highlights February 23, 2010 post Highlights, Issues, March 2010 http://gradschool.duke.edu/gsa/newsletter/?post_type=post&p=1251

Art, Art History & Visual Studies

Caroline Bruzelius (Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art History) received $26,000 from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to create a pilot project for “Visualizing Venice” involving two Duke graduate students and two recent Venetian post-doctoral students to create a 3D digital visualization of the two major mendicant churches of Venice, Sta. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and SS. Giovanni e Paolo.

Alexis Clark (doctoral student) received a 2010 Library Research Grant from the Getty Institute for dissertation-related research. Her topic of study is “‘Jargon d’Avant-Garde’: French Institutional and Art Critical Discourse, 1886-1907.”

Zoe Marie Jones (doctoral student) published, “Spiritual Crisis and the ‘Call to Order’: The Early Aesthetic Writings of Gino Severini and Jacques Maritain” in Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2010): 59-67. Zoe is also finishing her Fulbright year in Italy.

Meagan Green Labunski (doctoral student) received a Trustees Merit Citation from the Carter Manny Program for dissertation-related research. Her topic of study is “Friars in the City: Mendicant Architecture and Pious Practice in Medieval Verona (c. 1220-c. 1375).” Megan also began her Fulbright year in Italy in October 2009

Neil McWilliam (Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art and Art History) received $50,000 from the Provost’s Common Fund to support his exhibition, “Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature,” at The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Feb. 4-May 16, 2010).

Gennifer Weisenfeld (Associate Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies) was awarded a fellowship at the National Humanities Center for the academic year 2009-2010. The fellowship is to support the writing of her book project: “Imaging Disaster: Visual Culture in Japan after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake.”

Biochemistry

Robert Lefkowitz (James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University Medical Center) was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Biomedicine category. This award honors contributions that significantly advance the stock of knowledge in the biomedicine field because of their importance and originality. This is the second year the award has been given. It carries a cash prize of 400,000 euros (about $563,000).

Business Administration

Nilanjana Dutt (doctoral student) has had her article “Questions and Propositions. Vicarious Learning in the presence of Managerial Bias” accepted for publication by European Management Review.

Stephen Spiller (doctoral student) co-wrote an article accepted for publication in the June 2010 Journal of Consumer Research, “A Generalizable Scale of Propensity to Plan: The Long and the Short of Planning for Time and Money.”

Daniel Feiler (doctoral student) and Jack B. Soll (Associate Professor, Management and Organizations), published “A Blind Spot in Driving Decisions: How Neglecting Costs Puts Us in Overdrive,” in Climatic Change, 2010, 98, pp. 285-290.

Matthew Fox ( doctoral student), Leigh Tost (doctoral student), and Kimberly Wade-Benzoni (associate professor, management and organizations) have an article forthcoming, “The Legacy Motive: A Catalyst for Sustainable Decision Making in Organizations,” Business Ethics Quarterly, April 2010.

James R. Bettman (Burlington Industries Professor of Business Administration) and Gal Zauberman (Ph.D. 2000) along with B. Kyu Kim and Selin Malkoc were winners of the 2010 Paul Green Award for the article in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2009 most likely to contribute to marketing research: “Discounting Time and Time Discounting: Subjective Time Perception and Intertemporal Preferences,” Journal of Marketing Research, August 2009, 543-556.

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Yang Zhao (doctoral student) and Krishnendu Chakrabarty (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering) won the best paper award for their paper titled “Synchronization of concurrently-implemented fluidic operations in pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochips”at the IEEE International Conference on VLSI Design, held in Bangalore, India in January. This is a highly selective conference with 70 accepted papers this year out of 320 submissions. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Vamsee Pamula, who works at the Duke start-up company, Advanced Liquid Logic.

Krishnendu Chakrabarty (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering) was also named a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society for 2010-2012 and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation.

Gary Ybarra (Professor of the Practice of Electrical and Computer Engineering) has been selected to receive a Samuel DuBois Cook Award in recognition of his work as Director of Engineering K-Ph.D.

History

Assistant Professor of History Adriane Lentz-Smith has published Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009), which looks at the black freedom struggle in the World War I years, with a particular focus on manhood, citizenship claims, and the international experience. Professor Lentz-Smith is especially interested in how African Americans laid claim to the American nation even as they explored identities that extended beyond geographic boundaries.

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

Jonathan Protz (Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering) and Will Gardner (doctoral student) have created microturbines in the lab using chemical etching techniques. The microturbine fabrication represents a step towards completion of a microengine that they will be pitching as a method to improve the portability of electronics. Also, under Will’s leadership a team of Professor Protz’s students has entered the Duke Start Up Challenge and made it to the semi-finalist round. Professor Protz is also faculty advisor, and Will Gardner is graduate student advisor, to the Duke University Motorsports team, which was invited to present at a recent Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Carolina’s Section Student Night hosted at the Rocky Mount Cummins Diesel Plant. Two undergraduates, Jason Ethier and Ryan Sellers, delivered a presentation highlighting current research and development efforts taking place under the team’s guidance, composite suspension components and an innovative throttle design. The team is also entering the student presentation competition at this year’s SAE World Congress in Detroit in April.

Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP)

M. Louise Markert, MD, PhD, Pediatrics – Allergy and Immunology (Duke MSTP 1982); Richard D. Weiner, MD, PhD, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences – Biological Psychiatry (Duke MSTP 1973); Herbert E. Fuchs, MD, PhD, Surgery – Neurosurgery (Duke MSTP 1985); and William E. Garrett Jr., MD, PhD, Surgery – Orthopaedic Surgery (Duke MSTP 1976) were four of the 250 Duke physicians named by their colleagues around the state as among North Carolina’s very best — the doctors whom they would select for their own medical care or that of their families.

Three members of the MSTP faculty, Daniel J. Lew, PhD, professor, Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology; Joseph W. St. Geme III, MD, professor and chair of the Duke Department of Pediatrics; and Xiao-Fan Wang, PhD, professor, Duke Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology were elevated to the status of fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for their efforts in research which were deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.

Religion

Douglas Campbell (Associate Professor of New Testament) published The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), which was the subject of a panel review at the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, November 2009.

Richard Hays (George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament) will become dean of the Divinity School on July 1, 2010 for a two-year term.

John Kiess (doctoral student) received the Evan Frankel Fellowship for 2010-11.

Gregory Lee (doctoral student) was recognized by Arts & Sciences for excellence in teaching undergraduates. His evaluations were in the top 5% of all undergraduate instructors.

David Moffitt (doctoral student) won one of two regional scholars awards from the Society of Biblical Literature.

David Morgan (Professor of Religion) has published Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. London: Routledge, 2010. He has also delivered keynote addresses in Finland, Toronto, and London.

Slavic and Eurasian Studies

Angela Linhardt (M.A. student) is analyzing the representation of women’s political, professional, and social roles in Duke’s rich collection of Soviet posters. She has been working in Perkin’s Special Collections and the Nasher Museum of Art, and hopes to put together a small exhibit of specific posters with her commentaries.

Jehanne Gheith (Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies) won a 2009-2010 National Council for Eurasian and East European Research Grant. Her projected book, titled A Dog Named Stalin: Memory, Trauma and the Gulag, analyzes the life-history oral accounts she has compiled by interviewing Gulag survivors and their children.

Sociology

Kimberly Rogers (doctoral student) has been selected to receive the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for 2010-2011 for her dissertation project “Mapping the Social Ecology of Culture: Social Position, Connectedness, and Influence as Predictors of Systematic Variation in Affective Meaning.” This award provides support to cover costs associated with dissertation research, such as equipment, research assistance, and respondent compensation.

Heather Rackin (doctoral student) and Lane Destro (doctoral student) were named Sulzberger/Levitan fellows this year with the Center for Child and Family Policy.

David Brady (Associate Professor of Sociology) received the 2010 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring. A committee of senior deans and students representing the major disciplines of the Graduate School has selected Professor Brady from a highly competitive pool of nominees to receive this award, which recognizes graduate faculty who exhibit a consistent record of good mentoring practices.

Angela O’Rand (Professor of Sociology) presented in August the Matilda White Riley Lecture at ASA for career contributions to research in aging and the life course. She is President of the Southern Sociological Society and became Dean of Social Sciences.