Alumni Notes

Omar Aguilar (Statistical Science, Ph.D. ’98) recently moved to a new position as head of Portfolio Management at Financial Engines, a leading provider of retirement investment management services.

Carlos Carvalho (Statistical Science, Ph.D. ’06), currently Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been awarded a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dan Dillon (Psychology & Neuroscience, Ph.D. ’06) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard University, working with Dr. Diego Pizzagalli. This spring he received a Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). This two-year award will fund a project entitled “Toward a Functional Dissection of Anhedonia in Major Depression: Dissociating Decision-Making Deficits from Reward Insensitivity.”

Kevin J. Edgar (Chemistry, Ph.D. ’79) will be among the first class of American Chemical Society (ACS) Fellows honored at the 238th ACS national meeting in Washington D.C., August 16–20. ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and is dedicated to the advancement of the chemical enterprise and career development across all fields of chemistry.

Daniel L. Hendricks (Religion, Ph.D. ’77) an accomplished, 25-year fundraising professional and administrator in higher education and other not-for-profit settings has been appointed Vice Chancellor for Advancement at Purdue University Calumet.

Steve Ilardi (Psychology & Neuroscience, Ph.D. ’95) recently completed The Depression Cure: The Six-Step Program to Beat Depression Without Drugs. The book details his lifestyle-based approach to addressing depressive illness.

Michael Kane (Cognitive Psychology, Ph.D. ’95) was recently elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Al Mannes (Business Administration, Ph.D. ’09) has published his paper “Are We Wise About the Wisdom of Crowds? The Use of Group Judgments in Belief Revision.” as the lead article in August 2009 issue of Management Science. He is currently a postdoc in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Michael S. Mayer (History, M.A. ’75) has written Presidential Profiles: The Eisenhower Years, published by Facts on File. He is a professor of history at the University of Montana.

Elana Newman (Clinical Health Psychology, Ph.D. ’93) has been appointed as the McFarlin Endowed Chair in Psychology at the University of Tulsa.

Jared Niemi (Statistical Science, Ph.D. ’09) won a 2009 Student Paper Competition run by the American Statistical Association’s Section on Bayesian Statistical Science (SBSS). Jarad presented his winning paper, entitled “Adaptive Mixture Modelling Metropolis Methods for Bayesian Analysis of Non-Linear State-Space Models,” co-authored with advisor Prof Mike West, at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington DC in early August. Jared is now an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Applied Probability at University of California–Santa Barbara.

C. Kavin Rowe (Religion, Ph.D. ’05), Assistant Professor of New Testament at Duke University Divinity School was awarded the John Templeton Prize for Theological Promise by the Templeton Foundation. Rowe was one of 12 scholars worldwide to receive this award.

Carl Schimmel (Composition, Ph.D. ’08) was in residency over the summer at the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, NY, composing a work for Due East, a flute and percussion duo, as well as a work for the Netherlands-based sax and clarinet duo Henri Bok and Ann Evans. For the academic year, he was a visiting lecturer at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he taught composition.

October Sessions (Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Ph.D. ’09)and collaborators in the lab of Mariano Garcia Blanco used genetic silencing to identify dozens of proteins the dengue fever virus depends upon to grow and spread among mosquitoes and humans. October’s Ph.D. dissertation research, which appeared in Nature, opens the door to new ways to potentially prevent or treat the disease, which infects millions of people around the globe. October will be doing a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Eng Eong Ooi at the Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School.

Rebecca Thurston (Clinical Health Psychology, Ph.D. ’03) is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a Patient-Oriented Mentored Career Development Award (K23) from the National Institutes of Health. She is also the recipient of the New Investigator Award from the American Federation for Aging Research and the New Investigator and Vasomotor Symptoms Research Awards from the North American Menopause Society.

Omar Aguilar (Statistical Science, Ph.D. ’98) recently moved to a new position as head of Portfolio Management at Financial Engines, a leading provider of retirement investment management services. Carlos Carvalho (Statistical Science, Ph.D. ’06), currently Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been awarded a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship from […] pbess pakis.bessias@duke.edu order => 2. sidebar =>