Faculty and Student Highlights

Ayana Arce (Assistant Professor of Physics) is a recipient of the 2012 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Reggie Bain (Ph.D. student, Physics) is the recipient of a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship and is a Townes Perkin-Elmer Fellow for 2012 and 2013.

Fiona Barnett, Duke graduate student in the Literature Program and HASTAC Scholars Director, has been awarded the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, which is bestowed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The award recognizes graduate students who demonstrate a commitment to developing academic and civic responsibility in themselves and others and whose work reflects a strong emphasis on teaching and learning. For more information, click here.

Jonah Bernard (Ph.D. student, Physics) received an Outstanding Teaching Assistant award from the American Association of Physics Teachers for 2012.

Ashley Brown (Ph.D. candidate, Public Policy) has accepted a tenure-track position in political science at Amherst College for fall 2013.

Shailesh Chandrasekharan (Associate Professor of Physics) and former Duke postdoc Anyi Li (currently at the Institute for Nuclear Theory, in Seattle) were able to accurately compute properties of an interesting quantum critical point using a new idea in which fermions like quarks and electrons form regions called “fermion bags,” and Monte Carlo calculations are performed using these extended objects as degrees of freedom. These findings were published in a recent article in the Physical Review Letters. Their research paper can be found here.

Seth D. Cohen (Ph.D. candidate, Physics) published a manuscript in Physical Review Letters on a new sensing technique for locating the position of a small, sub-diffraction scatterer under the title “Sub-wavelength Position Sensing Using Nonlinear Feedback and Wave Chaos” [PRL 107, 254103 (2011)]. Physical Review Letters highlighted the publication as an “Editor’s Suggestion,” which indicates the cross-disciplinary appeal of the approach. In addition, Phys.org featured an article by Ashley Yeager, a science writer in Duke’s office of News and Communication, entitled “Chaos puts a path on Nanoparticles,” which describes the results for a general audience, available here.

Karen Cook (Ph.D. candidate, Music) successfully defended her dissertation titled, Theoretical Treatments of the Semiminim in a Changing Notational World, c.1315-c.1440 and has been hired as a Visiting Instructor in the Music Department to direct the Collegium during the spring 2013 semester.

Dwayne Dixon (Ph.D. candidate, Cultural Anthropology) published his essay, “Getting the Make: Japanese Skateboarder Videography and the Entranced Ethnographic Lens,” in the electronic Journal of Postmodern Culture.

Kevin Finelli (Ph.D. student, Physics) was the recipient of a 2012 Mary Creason Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching for outstanding teaching in the introductory physics laboratories at Duke University.

Gleb Finkelstein (Associate Professor of Physics) and his collaborators were manipulating the environment of tunneling electrons' using electrical leads and carbon nanotubes when they unexpectedly discovered they could create a quantum phase transition -- an abrupt change in the quantum state of the system. The team reports its findings Aug. 2 in the journal Nature, which can be found online here. Duke Today also featured their work in “Electromagnetic ‘Swamps” Don’t Always Bog Electrons Down,” available here.

Haiyan Gao (Professor of Physics and Chair) was named the Henry Newson Professor of Physics in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1, 2012. Also, in a new Physical Review Letters paper (J. Huang et al., PRL108, 052001 (2012), [link], co-authored by members of Professor Gao‘s Medium Energy Physics Group, new measurements of novel spin phenomena provide the first experimental indication of a partial alignment of quark spin along the direction of motion of a neutron spinning perpendicularly to its direction of motion.

Patrick Halpin (Associate Professor of Marine Geospatial Ecology) and Norman Christensen (Research Professor and founding dean of the Nicholas School) received an award from The Strategic Environmental Research Development Program for their work with the Defense Coastal/Estuarine Research Program.

Lia Haro (Ph.D. candidate, Cultural Anthropology) published a book chapter with Associate Professor of Political Science Romand Coles, “Journeys to Farther Shores: Intersecting Movements of Poetics, Politics and Theory Beyond Utopia” in The Aesthetic Turn in Politics, ed. Nicholas Compridis.

Matthew Hastings (Associate Professor of Physics) has been named one of 21 Simons Foundations Investigators. The award recognizes Hastings’ work in mathematical physics and quantum information theory on fundamental problem of interacting quantum systems. He recently published a paper in Science titled “Universal Signatures of Fractionalized Quantum Critical Points” which can found online here.

Min Huang (Ph.D. candidate, Physics) is the recipient of the Jefferson Sciences Associates (JSA)/JLab Graduate Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year. This is the second year in a row that Min has received this award.

Wendy Ann Kamdin (M.A. student, Liberal Studies) has been awarded the 2012 Confluence Award for Excellence in Creative Writing for her nonfiction essay “Death of an Elephant.” Confluence is the journal of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs. The award is a cash prize and publication in the Fall 2012 issue.

Chung-Ting Ke (Ph.D. student, Physics) received an Outstanding Teaching Assistant award from the American Association of Physics Teachers for 2012.

Sarah Kleinstein (Ph.D. student, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology) was awarded the Chancellor’s Scholarship.

Ashutosh Kotwal (Professor of Physics and Associate Chair) has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has been honored by the AAAS Council for a series of high-precision, world-leading measurements of the mass of the W boson, and for stringent tests of the standard model of fundamental particles.

Juni Kwon (Ph.D. candidate, Cultural Anthropology) was awarded the Sylvia Forman Student Paper Prize for graduate students for her paper titled, “The Economy of Remittances: Moral and Sexual Tensions of Korean Chinese Migration in Yanbian, China.”

Mark Kruse (Associate Professor of Physics) has been named a Bass Fellow and has been added to the Bass Chairs webpage under the “Meet the Fellows” tab. He has also been recently appointed to be the new Outreach and Education Coordinator for ATLAS in the United States.

Zepeng Li (Ph.D. student, Physics) received a Goshaw Fellowship for the years 2011-2012.

Ralph Litzinger (Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology) received the DukeEngage Excellence in Mentoring Award, which is presented to a faculty member or administrator who has demonstrated exceptional mentorship to DukeEngage Independent Project participants and exceptional leadership and vision in promoting civic engagement within higher education.

Yana Lowry (Ph.D. candidate, Music) was a presenter in July 2012 at the Summer Institute of the Slavic and East European Language Resource Center (SEELRC). The conference was titled: “Acquisition, Techniques, and Technologies” and her presentation was titled: “Learning History through Music. Ernst Busch: the Voice of a German Communist in the Stalinist Russia”..

Yi-Fan Lu (Ph.D. student, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology) has received a Government Scholarship for Study Abroad (GSSA). It is offered by the Taiwan government to support students who are currently studying abroad and pursuing graduate degrees. Each term of the fellowship is two years. This fellowship will support his research on the influence of human genetic variation on the IFN-alpha therapy for HCV chronic infection.

Angela Mace (Ph.D. candidate, Music) presented her paper, “The Mendelssohns and the Mystery of the ‘Easter Sonata’” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Nov. 3, 2012.

Cate Marcoux (Ph.D. student, Physics) was the recipient of a 2012 Mary Creason Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching for outstanding teaching in the introductory physics laboratories at Duke University.

Walter D. Mignolo (William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature, Professor of Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology, and Director, Center for Global Studies and the Humanities) received “The Honorific Recognition of the Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco, Chile, November 2012” for his scholarly and intellectual contributions in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. He was invited to the “First Istanbul World Forum,” convoked by Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan (October 2012). He was Visiting Fellow at the Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies at the City University of Hong-Kong (January-June 2012), where he published two interviews on current word transformations, published by the Institute and reprinted in several web sites, and another interview translated into Chinese and published in Marxism and Reality, July 2012. His co-authored book with Madina V. Tlostanova “Learning to Unlearn in Order to Relearn: Decolonial Reflexions from Eurasia and the Americas” was published in June of 2012. He delivered key notes and lectures in Singapore, Shanghai, Beijin, Macau, Neuquen (Argentina), Temuco (Chile), London, and delivered the closing key note at “Cross-Roads” the international conference of Cultural Studies in Paris, July of 2012. He was advisor of the Decolonial Aesthetics Event “Be.Bop 2012: Black Europe Geo-Body Politics” that took place in Berlin in May of 2012. With Rolando Vazquez, he co-organized, and co-taught the third Summer School on Decolonial Thinking at the Roosevelt Academy of the University of Utrecht in collaboration with the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities.

Darren Mueller ( Ph.D. candidate, Music ) co-organized a public talk on October 19^th by Grammy Award-winning record producer (and Duke alum, ’54) Creed Taylor in the auditorium at the Nasher Museum of Art. The multi-media retrospective, which included recordings of some of the top jazz artists of the 1950′s–1970′s, drew students and community members alike. The Creed Taylor residency, which included visits to classes and meetings with students in the Jazz Studies Program, was sponsored by the Department of Music Lecture Series, the Ethnomusicology Working Group, and the Duke Jazz Studies Program.

Berndt Muller (Professor of Physics) and Barbara Jacak (Stony Brook University) published a review in the July 20th issue of Science. You can read an article about it in the “Primordial ‘Soup’ of Big Bang Theory Recreated” on Live Science’s website here.

Danielle Pilla (Ph.D. student, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology) has received an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship is designed to help students initiate careers in cardiovascular and stroke research by providing research assistance and training. Pilla is a second-year graduate student and works in the laboratory of Jörn Coers, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. Pilla discovered a novel Interferon-induced antimicrobial resistance pathway and will explore the importance of this pathway in shaping the outcome of bacterial infections associated with heart disease.

Jane S. Richardson (James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry) and David. C. Richardson (Professor of Biochemistry) jointly presented the Distinguished Lecture at the NC section of the American Chemical Society on November 14, 2012 in Raleigh, NC. Jane S. Richardson was also named a 2012 Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association.

Philip Rupprecht (Associate Professor of Music) published Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012), a volume of essays co-edited with European colleagues Felix Woerner and Ullrich Scheideler. The book grew from the international conference (also called Tonality 1900-1950) held jointly at the Duke and UNC Music Departments in Fall 2010. Professor Rupprecht has also been awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This is a two semester grant to finish his book Avant-Garde Nation: British Musical Modernism 1956-79. The NEH offers two or three of these awards nationally in Musicology per year. The awards are given to individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholarship.

Amy Scurria (Ph.D. candidate, Music) will have her orchestral work What the Soul Remembers (commissioned by the Fort Wayne chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota) performed by the Southbay Philharmonic in March of 2013. A workshop on the opera Pearl, her dissertation piece, will be held in Massachusetts in December and performed at Shakespeare and Company again during the summer 2013 season with a cast largely composed of singers from the Metropolitan Opera Company. Excerpts of Pearl will also be performed in Shanghai, China in March of 2013 at the American Cultural Center at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology.

Margaret Shea (Ph.D. student, Physics) is a Townes Perkin-Elmer Fellow for the 2012-13 academic year.

Dan Sturdevant (M.A. student, Liberal Studies) has been published in the Fall 2012 issue of Confluence, the journal of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, for his nonfiction essay “Carl Fredriksens Transport: A Case Study of Norwegian Resistance in World War II.”

Cheryl Traylor (M.A. student, Liberal Studies) has been published in the Fall 2012 issue of Confluence, the journal of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, for her nonfiction essay, “Roads Not Taken.”

Cavin Ward-Caviness (Ph.D. candidate, Computational Biology & Bioinformatics) received an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development (ORD). This program is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and EPA.

Anne Watson (Ph.D. student, Physics) is the recipient of the Walter Gordy Fellowship and a fellowship from the Graduate Program in Nano-Science for Spring 2013.

Yang Yang (Ph.D. candidate, Physics) received the Katherine Goodman Stern Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year.