Faculty and Student Highlights
Matory Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
J. Lorand Matory, the Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke, has been elected to receive the Humboldt Research Award, a lifetime achievement award recognizing his contributions to the field.The award, approximately $80,000, is given to researchers whose work has had a significant impact on their own discipline and are expected to make additional contributions in the future. Alexander von Humboldt, the award's namesake, was a mid-19th century nature researcher and explorer of South America. Matory will conduct research at the Free University of Berlin and Berlin's Ethnological Museum to create an online interactive museum exhibition that has been in the works for three years.For more information on the award, visit the Humboldt Foundation website.
Gelfand Awarded Distinguished Achievement Medal
Alan Gelfand (Professor of Statistical Science) received a Distinguished Achievement Medal from the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Montreal. The award recognizes seminal work and leadership in Bayesian spatial statistics, in particular hierarchical modeling with applications in the natural and environmental sciences.
Gunsch Selected for Thomas Langford Lectureship Award
Claudia Gunsch (Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) is one of five recipients of Duke University’s Thomas Langford Lectureship Award for the upcoming academic year. This program was established in 2000 as a tribute to Thomas Langford, former Divinity School faculty member, dean, and provost. This annual lecture series is designed to provide Duke’s faculty with an opportunity to hear about the ongoing scholarly activities of their recently promoted or hired colleagues.
Glymph Elected to American Antiquarian Society
Thavolia Glymph (Associate Professor of African & African American Studies and History) has been elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Members are elected by their colleagues in recognition of scholarship, for support of cultural institutions, for manifest interest in bibliographical matters, or for distinction as community or national leaders in humanistic affairs. Since its establishment just over a hundred years ago, the Society has only elected some 2900 individuals to its membership, recognizing in its selection outstanding scholars, educators, writers (more than sixty of whom have won Pulitzer Prizes), publishers, collectors, librarians, journalists, civic leaders (including 14 U.S. Presidents), and lay persons with an interest in American history.
Anne Allison (Professor of Cultural Anthology) will have her fourth book, “Precarious Japan,” published by Duke Press. It will be released in November 2013.
Gloria Ayee (Ph.D. candidate, Political Science) participated in the Race, Scholarship, and the Disciplines symposium held this fall honoring 50 years of black students.
Anjishnu Banerjee (Ph.D. Statistical Science, 2013) has accepted a position as a Research Scientist with Amazon LLC.
David N. Beratan (R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry) was named a fellow of the American Chemical Society.
Fernando Bonassi (Ph.D. Statistical Science 2013) was awarded a 2013 Student Travel Award from the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association. These awards are made based on a submitted research paper. The winners present their papers at the Joint Statistical Meetings and were recognized at the 2013 meetings in Montreal. Bonassi has accepted a position as a Statistician with Google Quantitative Marketing.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Professor of Sociology) was inducted into the Sociological Research Association, an honor society of sociological scholars founded in 1936. The 400-plus members of this organization are regarded as leading and influential sociologists.
Michael Boyce (Assistant Professor of Biochemistry) has been named a 2013 Scholar of the Rita Allen Foundation and a 2013 Kimmel Scholar of the Sydney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research.
Luke Bretherton (Associate Professor of Religion) received the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for his book on Christianity and politics. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams awarded the theological writing prize to Bretherton for Christianity and Contemporary Politics on May 28 at the Telegraph Hay Festival in Britain. Bretherton received an approximate $16,000 prize for the book, published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2010.
Cameron Brown (2nd-year doctoral student, Chemistry) received a 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.
Linda Burton (James B. Duke Professor of Sociology) was inducted into the Sociological Research Association, a honor society of sociological scholars founded in 1936. The 400-plus members of this organization are regarded as leading and influential sociologists.
Erin Callahan-Price (Ph.D. English, 2013) has accepted a tenure-track position in Linguistics at Western Carolina University for fall 2013.
Patrick Charbonneau (Assistant Professor of Chemistry) was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 2013 Research Fellow. The two-year award recognizes 126 researchers annually for their potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Charbonneau studies the atomic interactions of glass, gels and other soft matter.
Trenita Childers (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology) participated in the Race, Scholarship, and the Disciplines symposium held this fall honoring 50 years of black students at Duke University.
Merlise Clyde (Professor of Statistical Science) is the new chair of the Department of Statistical Science, effective July 1.
Ashon Crawley (Ph.D. English, 2013) has accepted a tenure-track position in African American Studies at the University of California-Riverside for fall 2013.
D. Edward Davis (3rd-year Ph.D. student, Music) used a Summer Research Fellowship from the Duke University Graduate School to participate in the EcoSono Institute in Alaska this summer. He spent three weeks traveling around the state making field recordings and learning about ‘eco-acoustics’ with composer Matthew Burtner.
Marc Deshusses (Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) is leading a team that will design and demonstrate a novel neighborhood-scale sewage treatment for developing countries. The new treatment is a high pressure-high temperature process that relies on supercritical water oxidation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting the team’s efforts with a $1.3 million grant as part of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.
Lynne Feeley (Ph.D. candidate, English) has been appointed a Sawyer Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Xue Feng (4th-year Ph.D. student, Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Amilcare Porporato (Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) published a paper in Nature Climate Change titled “Changes in rainfall seasonality in the tropics.” Introduced in the News and Views section of the September 2013 Nature Climate Change issue, the paper highlights the importance of considering seasonal rainfall timing in addition to total rainfall amount, especially in arid and semi-arid parts of the tropics.
Aaron Forbis-Stokes (2nd-year Ph.D. student, Civil & Environmental Engineering) spent most of the summer in Eldoret, Kenya deploying a novel sanitation technique he helped develop in the lab. With the help of local partners and two students of the University of Eldoret, Aaron installed three systems, each comprising three toilets, an anaerobic digester, and a heat sterilizing/heat recovery system. The University of Eldoret students are now monitoring the efficacy of the systems.
Henri Gavin (Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) was selected for a second term as a Bass Teaching Fellow in the Bass Program for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. The Bass professorships recognize faculty who exemplify the master teacher-scholar through their outstanding records in undergraduate teaching and research.
Anna Gibson (Ph.D candidate, English) is the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for academic year 2013-14.
Bryan Gilliam (Professor of Music) delivered a talk at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York on August 24th.
Arno L. Greenleaf (Professor of Biochemistry) used a seed grant from the Duke Cancer Institute to carry out the project “Genetically-Guided Drug Target Discovery for New Anti-Cancer Drugs.” Several novel enzyme targets were discovered for BRCA1-driven cancers. Finding small molecule inhibitors for one or more of these targets will be the next step toward developing tumor-specific drugs.
Kerry Haynie (Associate Professor of Political Science and African & African American Studies) has been selected as the winner of the 2013 best paper award from the American Political Science Association’s Women and Politics Research Section for his paper “Representing Women’s Interests and Intersections of Gender, Race and Ethnicity in U.S. State Legislatures.”
Julie Kelto Lillis (Ph.D. candidate, Religion) was the recipient of the Ernestine Friedl Research Award for a dissertation project involving the cultural, social, and biological construction of gender. The working title of the dissertation is “Integrity, Seals, Uncorruption: Female Bodies and Configurations of Virginity in Early Christianity.”
Shian-Ling Keng (Ph.D. Psychology & Neuroscience, 2013) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore.
Tsuyoshi Kunihama (Ph.D. candidate, Statistical Science) was awarded a 2013 Student Travel Award by the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association for his paper with David Dunson on “Bayesian Modeling of Temporal Dependence in Large Sparse Contingency Tables.”
Curtis Lee (2nd-year doctoral student, Civil and Environmental Engineering) won the CSSS poster competition at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently. Curtis’s poster was titled “A Narrow-Band Gradient-Augmented Level Set Method for Incompressible Two-Phase Flow.”
Tommy Leininger (Ph.D. candidate, Statistical Science) was awarded a 2013 Student Travel Award by the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association for his paper with Alan Gelfand, Jenica Allen and John Silander on “Spatial Regression Modeling for Compositional Data with Many Zeros.”
Yingbo Li (Ph.D. Statistical Science, 2013) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Statistics, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Clemson University.
Jianfeng Lu (Assistant Professor of Mathematics) was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 2013 Research Fellow. The two-year award recognizes 126 researchers annually for their potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Lu helps scientists in chemistry, materials science and biology develop mathematical descriptions of their observations.
Angela Mace (Ph.D. Music, 2013) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music History at Colorado State University.
Marco Marani (Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) was elected to the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti of Venice (Venice Institute of Science, Letters, and Arts), part of the worldwide circuit of National Academies.
Sandra Nay (Ph.D. Psychology & Neuroscience, 2013) has accepted the Post-Doctoral Fellow in Psychology at the Christian Sarkine Autism Treatment Center, Indiana University School of Medicine.
Mark Anthony Neal (Professor of African & African American Studies) has been named a 2013-14 Du Bois Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The Du Bois Institute is the nation’s oldest research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture, and social institutions of Africans and African Americans. The Fellows Program, the oldest of the Institute’s activities, awards up to twenty fellowships annually to scholars at various stages of their careers in the fields of African and African American Studies, broadly defined to cover the expanse of the African Diaspora.
Diane Nelson (Associate Professor of Cultural Anthroplogy) has co-edited a book with Carlota McAllistera, “War By Other Means: Aftermath in Postgenocide Guatemala,” which will be published by Duke University Press and released in October.
Melony Ochieng (2nd-year doctoral student, Chemistry) received a 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship and a GEM Associate Fellowship in Chemistry Melony is working on a joint project between the Craig and Zauscher Labs that involves the synthesis and characterization of mechanoresponsive polymer brushes.
Megan O’Connor (2nd-year doctoral student, Civil and Environmental Engineering) received an Honorable Mention in the Oderbrecht Award Competition http://www.odebrechtaward.com for her work on Hydraulic Fracturing Water Treatment Technologies with Professors Marc Deshusses and Desiree Plata.
Francesca Petralia (Ph.D. Statistical Science 2013) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Genetics & Genomics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Louis DuBose Quin (Professor Emeritus of Chemistry) was named a fellow of the American Chemical Society.
Charmaine Royal (Associate Professor of African & African American Studies) has been selected as one of five recipients of Duke University’s Thomas Langford Lectureship Award for the academic year 2013-14. This program was established in 2000 as a tribute to the memory of Thomas Langford, former Divinity School faculty member, Dean, and Provost, who embodied the highest university values of scholarship, teaching, collegiality, and the promotion of faculty excellence and community. This annual Langford Lectureship series is designed to provide Duke’s faculty with an opportunity to hear about the ongoing scholarly activities of their recently promoted or hired colleagues.
Daniel Ruccia (Ph.D. Music, 2013) has accepted a position as Advertising, Design, and Production Coordinator in Journals Marketing at Duke University Press.
Philip Rupprecht (Associate Professor of Music) is the editor of Rethinking Britten (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Michael Stanton (Ph.D. Psychology & Neuroscience, 2013) has accepted the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the VA Palo Alto & Stanford University.
Larry Todd (Professor of Music) has released a new CD, Felix Mendelssohn: The Complete Works for Cello & Piano, featuring Nancy Green, cello, and R. Larry Todd, piano.
Katharina Uhde (Ph.D. candidate, Music) has been awarded the Karl Geiringer award by the American Brahms Society for “Joseph Joachim’s ‘Abendglocken’ Op. 5: A Musical Daguerreotype,” the first chapter of her dissertation.
Fangpo Wang (Ph.D. Statistical Science, 2013) has accepted a position as a Data Scientist at Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, CA.
Judy Winglee (2nd-year Ph.D. student, Civil and Environmental Engineering) won the Department of Defense’s – National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.
Yikun Zhao (2nd-year doctoral student, Civil and Environmental Engineering) was awarded the Best Student Poster Award in Public Health and Environment at ASME’s Nanoengineering in Medicine and Biology 2012 Congress.
Magdalena Zurawski (Ph.D. English, 2013) has accepted a tenure-track position in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia – Athens for fall 2013.
Anne Allison (Professor of Cultural Anthology) will have her fourth book, “Precarious Japan,” published by Duke Press. It will be released in November 2013. Gloria Ayee (Ph.D. candidate, Political Science) participated in the Race, Scholarship, and the Disciplines symposium held this fall honoring 50 years of black students. Anjishnu Banerjee (Ph.D. Statistical Science, 2013) has […] pbess pakis.bessias@duke.edu sidebar =>