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CLAS Awards
CLAS Faculty Win Recognition
Chemistry Department head Steve Suib, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, will receive the Northeast Region Award for Achievements in the Chemical Sciences for 2009. The award is given by the Northeast Region of the American Chemical Society.
Jose Gascon, assistant professor of chemistry, was one of four national winners of a Hewlett Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award given by the Division of Computers in Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.
History professor Fakhreddin Azimi won the Mossadegh Prize for his recent book The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle Against Authoritarian Rule. The prize is given biennially by the Geneva-based Mossadegh Foundation and will be presented at a ceremony in Geneva in January 2010.
Chemistry assistant professors Jose Gascon and Nicholas Leadbeater were awarded CAREER awards for young teacher-scholars from the National Science Foundation.
Joseph Glaz, professor, associate head and director of graduate programs for the Department of Statistics, has been elected a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Shayla Nunnally, assistant professor of political science, is the Eastern Region Member of the Year for the National Urban League Young Professionals. She is a member of the Hartford chapter.
Kenneth Couch, associate professor of economics, is a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC for the 2009 fall semester. His research focuses on disadvantaged groups in the labor market and policies aimed at assisting them. Currently he is researching outcomes associated with employment training services offered to welfare recipients.
Mwangi Samson Kimenyi, associate professor of economics, has been named a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kimenyi will join the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings, focusing on Africa\'s development challenges. He is the founding executive director of the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis.
Maria Giordina, associate professor of mathematics, is only the third person to win the Ruth I. Micheler Memorial Prize awarded by Cornell University and the Association of Women in Mathematics. The award will support her residency at Cornell to work on her research on infinite dimensional spaces.
Diane Lilo-Martin in linguistics and Gregory Anderson in ecology and evolutionary biology were named 2009 Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors, the highest honor for faculty at UConn.
Robert R. Birge, The Harold S. Schwenk, Sr., Distinguished Chair in Chemistry in CLAS, was awarded the 2009 Connecticut Medal of Science, the state’s highest award for scientists.
Two faculty members in CLAS were named finalists for the 2009 Women of Innovation awards given by the Connecticut Technology Council. Amy Howell, professor of chemistry, was cited for working broadly on issues of workforce development, such as recruiting and retaining underrepresented groups in math and science disciplines, and for developing a pilot master of science program with Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. Susanne Yelin, associate professor of physics, was cited for balancing her own research with passing on her passion for physics to her students.
Fakhreddin Azimi, professor of history, has been awarded the Mossadegh Prize for his recent book,The Quest for Democracy in Iran. The prize is a biennial award of the Geneva-based Mossadegh Foundation for outstanding work in Iranian studies.
The first CLAS Awards for Excellence in Research were given this spring to four faculty representing the humanities, natural sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences. The awards were to Mary Burke, assistant professor of English; Donald H. Les, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; James F. Rusling, professor of chemistry; and Stephen L. Ross, professor of economics. The research awards will alternate by year with CLAS Awards for Excellence in Teaching.
Robert Gross, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, has been named the Honors Council Faculty Member of the Year for 2009.
Three faculty were chosen National Endowment for the Humanities fellows for 2009. Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy, will write a book defending an original theory of truth. Richard Wilson, the Gladstein Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and Director of the Human Rights Institute, will devote his fellowship to completing a book on three United Nations tribunals. Frank Costigliola, professor of history, will be an NEH fellow at the School of Historical Studies in the Instutute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He was also recently elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Timothy Byrne, professor of geology, is one of four co-chief scientists for a drilling expedition this summer in a seismogenic zone off the coast of Japan, the international NanTroSEIZE project. A Japanese-built research vessel will collect sediment samples for study from beneath the sea floor. Byrne was also recently elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Alexis Dudden, associate professor of history, has been selected as a Fulbright scholar to Japan by the Japan-United States Educational Commission. She will conduct research in Japan during the 2009-10 academic year on “Niigata and Japan’s Cold War.”
Diane Lillo-Martin, professor of linguistics, and Gregory Anderson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, were named Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors, the University’s highest faculty honor, in the board’s 2009 awards.
Daniel Mulkey, assistant professor of physiology and neurobiology, won a $500 award and prize, the Neural Control and Autonomic Regulation Section Research Recognition Award for 2009, from the American Physiological Society at its Experimental Biology meeting.
Two journals edited by Sandra Shumway, research professor of marine sciences, were listed among the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over 100 years by the Special Libraries Association, a professional organization of more than 11,000 specialist librarians. The journals are: The Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology and The Journal of Shellfish Research.
Lawrence Goodheart, professor of history teaching at the Greater Hartford campus, has been selected as a Fulbright scholar to Turkey for the 2009-10 academic year.
Charles Super and Sara Harkness, professors of human development and family studies, were recognized for their “distinguished contributions to cultural and contextual factors in child development” at the Presidential Awards Ceremony at the biannual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
Steve Kalb, adjunct professor of journalism, won the Undergraduate Student Government’s Educator of the Year award. Kalb is also a freelance radio reporter. Robert V. Gallo, professor of physiology and neurobiology, won USG’s award for advisor of the year.
Shayla C. Nunnally, assistant professor of political science, is the 2009 recipient of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists’ Fannie Lou Hamer Outstanding Community Service Award. The award is named in honor of the late civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who campaigned for racial justice in Mississippi.
Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, has been awarded a Howard Fellowship by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation of Brown University. He will be a fellow at Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America where he will work on his upcoming book, “Bleeding Mexico White”: Race, Nation and the History of Mexico-U.S. Migration,” which is under contract with Duke University Press.
Newly elected members of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering from CLAS are J. Peter Gogarten, professor of molecular and cell biology; Pieter Visscher, professor of marine sciences and director of the Center for Integrative Geosciences; and Robert Whitlach, professor of marine sciences.
CLAS Students Collect Honors
Professional Science Master\'s degree student Bo Pietraszkiewicz has been awarded one of five competitive National Institute of Justice Graduate Research Fellowships.
Jason Schmink, a PhD candidate in chemistry, is one of 13 students in the country to win the American Chemical Society\'s Division of Organic Chemistry fellowship.
Summer research awards from the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering at UConn went to nine graduate students in CLAS. The CESE awards encourage multidisciplinary research and require students to have faculty project advisers from at least two different disciplines. The awards went to: Zinnia Mukherjee in economics; Chiu-Yen Kuo, Lauren Stefaniak and Kimberley Gallagher in marine sciences; Chunhu Chen in chemistry; Laura Cisneros, Jonathan Velotta and Corey Merow in ecology and evolutionary biology; and David Leslie in anthropology.
Kathryn Theiss, a PhD student in ecology and evolutionary biology, has won a prestigious national award, a Switzer Foundation fellowship, for young environmental leaders. She is studying the decline of two rare orchid species in Madagascar.
Jason Schmink, a PhD candidate in chemistry, is one of 13 students in the country and the first from UConn to win the American Chemical Society\'s Division of Organic Chemistry fellowship. His research uses microwaves in organic synthesis. He will present a poster about it at the National Organic Symosium at Princeton University in June 2011.
The Department of Molecular and Cell Biology awarded donor-established and named fellowships to the following students for 2009: Lindsay Finch and Andrew Mehta received Todd M. Schuster fellowships and awards. Laura Hall received the Claire M. Berg Graduate Fellowship in Genetics. Gino Intrieri won the Arthur Chovnick Fellowship in Genetics. Yang-Hui Yeh received the Richard C. Crain, Jr. Memorial Fellowship. Edward A. Khairallah Fund scholarships were awarded to Rory Coleman, Igor Gurevich, Caroline Jakuba, and Scott Corley. Jean Lucas-Lenard Special Summer Fellowships in Biochemistry went to Margaret Suhanovsky and Scott Corley. Pfizer Summer Fellowships in Molecular and Cell Biology were awarded to Derek Bickhart, John Ngunjiri and Michael Wosczyna. Andrew Collins received the Antonio H. and Marjorie J. Romano Graduate Education Fellowship.
Adam Wilson, a doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology, was awarded a three-year graduate fellowship from NASA. His adviser is EEB professor John A. Silander, Jr.
Four graduate students in CLAS were chosen to receive 2009 Michael J. Hogan Graduate Summer Research Awards. They are: Juan Carlos Villarreal, ecology and evolutionary biology, Asha Bhandary, philosophy, Annie Fox, psychology, and Gordon Gauchat, sociology.
Three students were selected for the CLAS Outstanding Senior Women Awards. They are: Charlayne McStay, a chemistry major; Kaitlyn Widlak, an American studies major, and Joelle Budzinsky, a history major.
Fourth-year PhD student Amanda Wendt won a Fulbright Scholarship for her research into the roosting and foraging behavior and seed dispersal habits of a species of bat. The ecology and evolutionary biology student is participating in a large field study at La Selva Biological Station in northern Costa Rica.
Fernando Alfonso, CLAS ’09, an English major, was awarded a Newhouse Graduate Newspaper Fellowship and Apprenticeship for Minorities to attend graduate school at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he will be in the magazine, newspaper, and online journalism program. He was one of two students chosen from 45 applicants.
Corey Schmitt, CLAS ’11, a political science major, was elected to a two-year term as the undergraduate student representative on the UConn Board of Trustees. Richard Colon, a PhD candidate in anthropology, is the graduate student representative.
Sylvie Tchumtchoua, a graduate student in statistics, is a 2009 recipient of the Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Award.
Brien T. Buckman, CLAS ’12, was elected to a two-year term as a student director on the University of Connecticut Foundation Board of Directors. The Foundation board oversees planning and implementation of fund-raising activities at UConn, investment of endowment, and administration of the Foundation. Buckman is a political science and philosophy major and a member of the Undergraduate Student Government.
Jennifer Orlando, a senior English major from Southbury, CT has won the 2009 Collins Literary Prize for poetry. The fiction winner is Emily Lyon, CLAS ’02 (philosophy and linguistics) who is now pursuing a degree in printmaking. Both prizes have $1,400 awards.
The first-place winner of the 46th annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize in CLAS is Sean Forbes, a fourth-year PhD student studying English literature with a concentration in creative writing. The second-place winner is Lori Carriere, a first-year master’s degree student of English literature. Winning third place is Nicole Rubin, a freshman honors student majoring in biology and human rights, with a concentration in creative writing. The prize awards are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second, and $300 for third place. The poetry prize is sponsored by The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., and The Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens. Wallace Stevens, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was a resident of Hartford and an executive at Hartford Accident and Indemnity.
Jennifer Paulovicks McCullagh, a doctoral student in audiology, won a highly competitive NIH-AAS research award for 2009. She presented her work at the American Auditory Society meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. She has also been chosen for the American Academy of Audiology Student Research Award.
Alumni Association Awards
CLAS faculty and an alumna won 2009 UConn Alumni Association awards.
Linda Strausbaugh, professor of molecular and cell biology, and Sharon Harris, professor of English, won 2009 Alumni Association awards for faculty members. Strausbaugh won the award for Faculty Excellence in Teaching at the undergraduate level, and Harris won the Faculty Excellence in Research award for the humanities and social sciences. Theresa Hopkins-Staten, a 1981 graduate in sociology, magna cum laude, won the Alumni Association Service Award. She is the campaign director for New England East-West Solution Projects for Northeast Utilities, where she directs and plans community relations in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts. She received her JD from UConn Law School in 1984.