Alumni and faculty to be honored

Prof. Madych

Two CLAS alumni and two faculty members are among the 2008 Alumni and Faculty Award recipients. They will receive their awards at an Alumni Gala on October 24 at the Nafe Katter Theatre.

Annette Lombardi, CLAS '76, will receive the Alumni Association Service Award. Jessica Stone Beauchemin, CLAS '98, will be recognized with the Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) award.

Nancy A. Naples, professor of sociology and women's studies, will receive the Faculty Excellence in Research (Humanities and Social Sciences) award. Wolodymyr Madych, professor of mathematics, will receive the award for Faculty Excellence in Research (Sciences).

In addition, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Psychology David Kenny is in his third and final year as the Distinguished Alumni Professor.

Annette Lombardi, who was a political science major in CLAS, works for the Connecticut Department of Social Services in the Waterbury regional office. She held several offices on the national UConn Alumni Association board of directors from 2002 through June 2008 and chaired or co-chaired several committees, including Scholarship. Since 2007 she has been an alumni mentor to UConn student leaders in the Leadership Legacy program.

Jessica Stone Beauchemin was an English major in CLAS. She is being honored for her public service and work with the National Capitol Chapter of the Alumni Association. She has been active in alumni chapters in Boston and Washington, DC, where she is completing a three-year term as president. Under her tenure, the Washington chapter has expanded its community-service and family activities. Beauchemin is an account supervisor at Ketchum, an international communications agency.

Prof. Naples' research includes studying how low income and working class urban and rural communities respond to state and externally imposed policies and programs. She has conducted evaluation research on programs designed to improve access to justice for crime victims with disabilities and survivors of childhood sexual assault.

Prof. Naples

She is the author of several books, including Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work and the War on Poverty . She also has edited or co-edited several volumes. Currently she is working on a new book, Restructuring the Heartland: Racialization and Social Regulation of Citizenship , which investigates the link between global economic change, social policy, and community-based social restructuring in the rural U.S.

She served as president of Sociologists for Women in Society and she is chair-elect of the Sex and Gender section of the American Sociological Association.

Naples received her PhD from the City University of New York and has been on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine; Iowa State University; and the State University of New York, Old Westbury. She came to UConn in 2003.

Prof. Madych trained in the mathematical area known as classical harmonic analysis. He has since branched out to study approximation theory, tomography, and areas of applied mathematics that are concerned with the representation, reconstruction, and manipulation of signals and images. He has written more than 70 research articles published in peer-reviewed journals and has received significant federal research grants.

Most recently he has collaborated with investigators at the Helmholtz Research Center in Munich, Germany on mathematical problems associated with the reconstruction of images in certain models of Photoacoustic Tomography (PAT), a promising new imaging method that is not yet commercially available. Compared with CAT scanners, the raw data for PAT images consist of averages over a group of more complicated geometrical objects.

Madych earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Minnesota and came to UConn in 1984 after working at Iowa State University and Texas A and M.