Faculty and Student Highlights
Business Administration
Drew Carton (fourth-year doctoral student) won the best student paper award for his paper “Enhancing Leadership Theories with Goal Structure” in the Management and Organizational Cognition Division at the 2008 Academy of Management annual conference in Anaheim, California.
Jim Smith (Professor of Business Administration) was awarded the Ramsey Medal by the Decision Analysis Society for distinguished contributions to the field of decision analysis.
Bennet Zelner (Assistant Professor of Business Administration) received the Haynes Prize for the most promising scholar under 40 at the 2008 Academy of International Business meetings.
Computational Biology & Bioinformatics
David Orlando (fifth-year doctoral student) recently published a first-author paper in Nature, titled “Global control of cell-cycle transcription by coupled CDK and network oscillators.”
Deborah Winter (first-year doctoral student) was awarded an academic scholarship from National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Cultural Anthropology
Elizabeth Davis (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology) organized a successful October conference on “Scenes of Secrecy: Interdisciplinary Inquiries on Suspicion, Intelligence, and Security.” An art exhibit (which continues through January 4, 2009) and film series were also a part of the activities.
Cultural Anthropology grad students presented papers and participated on panels at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropology Association in San Francisco, November 19-23, 2008. Students included: Attiya Ahmad, Neta Bar, Leigh Campoamor, Jason Cross, Dwayne Dixon, Micah Gilmer, Giles Harrison-Conwill, Alvaro Jarrin, Bianca Robinson, Aaron Thornburg, and Netta van Vliet.
A team of Cultural Anthropology doctoral students (including planning committee members, Ronni Armstead and Lorien Olive) is organizing a joint Duke-UNC conference on “States of Captivity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Incarceration, Rendition, and Detention” to be held February 27–28, 2009.
Economics
Michael Els (master’s student, Class of 2010) has been selected as one of only ten finalists in the 2008 Nedbank and Old Mutual Budget Speech Competition in South Africa. The Nedbank and Old Mutual Speech Competition is an essay competition for university students who are studying economics. Finalists will be hosted in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2009, where they will attend the reading of the Budget Speech in Parliament by the Minister of Finance.
Charles Becker (Research Professor of Economics) has been awarded the 2008 Diversity Award by Duke University for his years of hard work and dedication to programs such as the American Economic Association’s Summer Program and Minority Scholarship Program.
Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE)
Dr. Kishor Trivedi (Hudson Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science) has been awarded the IEEE Computer Society’s 2008 Technical Achievement Award.
Jeff Rogers (sixth-year doctoral student, advised by ECE Professor Jeff Krolik) won first place and a $500 prize in the student paper competition at the IEEE OCEANS 2008 Conference in Quebec City for his paper, “Passive Broadband Source Localization in Shallow-water Multipath Acoustic Channels.” Jeff’s work beat out 60 other papers.
Christy Fernandez (fourth-year doctoral student, advised by ECE Professor David Brady, and a member of the Duke Imaging and Spectroscopy Group) received a 2008 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Fernandez’s application was selected by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research from over 3,400 applications.
Latin American & Caribbean Studies
Antonio Viego (Director of Latino/a Studies, Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies) received the Modern Language Association of America Prize in Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his book, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, published in 2007 by Duke University Press.
Literature
Fredric Jameson (Professor of Literature) will receive the Holberg International Memorial Prize. It is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law, and theology.
Music
Janet Jieru Chen (third-year doctoral student in composition) has been accepted at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD) for the International Music Course in Composition. Janet’s composition, Isolated Island, was the winner of this year’s William Klenz music prize for composition and also was performed by the Luxembourg Sinfonietta as Taiwan’s representative at the World Music Days sponsored by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM).
Angela Mace (third-year doctoral student in musicology) will deliver a paper entitled “Reception of Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Hear My Prayer’ in England” at the North American British Music Studies’ Third Biennial Conference this summer. She is currently editing Mendelssohn’s Liederbuch für Cecile, 1845, held by the Juilliard Manuscript Collection. Angela’s edited version of the Liederbuch will be premiered on February 3, 2009 (Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday) in New York by the Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York.
Robert Parkins (University Organist and Professor of the Practice of Music) performed two recitals this fall in conjunction with the “El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III” exhibition in the Nasher Museum of Art. On September 11, 2008, he presented Cabezón to Cabanilles: The Golden Age of Iberian Keyboard Music on the harpsichord in the Nasher Auditorium. A second program on October 19 featured Iberian Organ Music from the Golden Age on the Brombaugh organ in Duke Memorial Chapel. For many years Professor Parkins has specialized in early Iberian keyboard music, publishing several articles on performance practice as well as making recordings on a number of different labels.
Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science (MEMS)
The popular interdisciplinary design-as-science course, ME166: Constructal Theory and Design, developed by MEMS faculty Adrian Bejan (J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering) and Sylvie Lorente (Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Toulouse, Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse (INSA), France, and Adjunct Professor at Duke University) is the basis of a new book, “Design with Constructal Theory” (Wiley, 2008).
Robert Ferris (first-year doctoral student working with Professor Stefan Zauscher) recently qualified and completed the Ironman World Championships in Kona, HI. He completed the race in 9:48:32, after qualifying only 2 months prior at Subaru Ironman Canada. Though he is looking forward to Ironman Wisconsin in Sept. 2009, he is currently enjoying the break.
Brian Mann (Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science) was awarded an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award to study energy harvesting in the ocean.
Krista Michalis (third-year doctoral student) won the Student Paper and Presentation Competition at the NoiseCon & ASME Noise Control and Acoustics Division joint conference in Dearborn, Michigan, July 2008.
Neurobiology
Dr. Michael D. Ehlers, (Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute) received the Life Sciences Achievement Award from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center in 2008. This award is given to a single North Carolina researcher for outstanding breakthrough research in the life sciences.
Nursing
Rebecca Kitzmiller, (Doctoral student and Duke Health Technologies Informatics Fellow) has been named the 2008 Health Systems Nurse of the Year by the North Carolina Nurses Association.
Psychology & Neuroscience
Dr. Terrie E. Moffitt has been awarded the Klaus Grawe Award for the Advancement of Innovative Research in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy for her research concerning the interrelation between genetic disposition and environmental factors in the development of problem behavior. The goals of the Klaus Grawe Foundation are to support excellent interdisciplinary and innovative research in clinical psychology and psychotherapy and their connected disciplines in the spirit of Klaus Grawe.
Dr. David Rubin was named the Juanita M. Kreps Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, which is the highest honor Duke awards to its faculty for distinguished professorship by the Board of Trustees, President Richard Brodhead, and Provost Peter Lange.
NRSA awarded fellowships to Maureen Ritchey and Simon Davis (fourth-year doctoral students in cognitive neuroscience).
Statistical Science
Simone Gray (fourth-year doctoral student) received a prestigious Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Public Health Research Dissertation Grant. These awards are highly competitive and are designed to encourage doctoral candidates from a variety of academic disciplines and programs to conduct research in areas of interest to the CDC, especially contributions to the health promotion and disease prevention objectives of the “Healthy People 2010″ initiative.