Awards, Honors, and Professorships

Three A&S Faculty Awarded Sloan Research Fellowships

Six University of Washington faculty—half of them from the College of Arts and Sciences—are among the 118 recipients of 2011 Sloan Research Fellowships, given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The awardees represent 54 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. According to the foundation, the fellowships "seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise."

The awards are given in recognition of fellows' distinguished performance and the potential to make substantial contributions to their field. The new fellows from Arts and Sciences are:

Xiaosong Li, Assistant Professor, Chemistry
Li, who joined the UW faculty in 2005, focuses on developing and applying electronic structure theories and novel molecular dynamics to study properties and reactions that occur in large systems such as polymers, biomolecules, and nanoparticles.

Dustin Maly, Assistant Professor, Chemistry
Maly, who joined the UW faculty in 2006, is involved in the development of new chemical tools to allow greater understanding of how cells are able to gather and organize a large amount of environmental information and convert those signals into complex behaviors such as growth, differentiation, and spontaneous movement.

Paul Wiggins, Assistant Professor, Bioengineering and Physics
Wiggins, who joined the UW faculty last fall, studies the physics of biological systems at the microscopic scale. For example, he looks at the forces involved when chromosomes separate to divide the DNA, or how the physical forces on a bacterial cell’s DNA and membranes affect its behavior.

The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955, initially in only three areas: physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Since then, 38 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields, and 16 have received the Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics. The program now also recognizes researchers in economics; next year it will expand to include ocean sciences.

The fellowships include a grant of $50,000 over a two-year period. Once chosen, Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ Fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.

"The scientists and researchers selected for this year's Sloan Research Fellowships represent the very brightest rising stars of this generation of scholars," said Paul Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "The Foundation is proud to be able to support their work at this important stage in their careers."

 

Other Awards, Honors, and Professorships

Jordanna Bailkin, associate professor of history, has been awarded the Walter D. Love Article Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies for her article “The Postcolonial Family? West African Children, Private Fostering, and the British State,” Journal of Modern History (2009). Bailkin also has been named a Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History.

Marshall Brown, professor of comparative literature, has been named a Distinguished Scholar for 2011 by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

Stephanie M.H. Camp, associate professor of history, is newly appointed as the Dio Richardson Endowed Professor of History.

Patricia Ebrey, professor of history, has received the 2010 Shimada Prize for her book, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong.  The Shimada Prize is awarded for distinguished scholarship in the history of East Asian art every two years by the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and The Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies in Kyoto, Japan.

Susan Glenn, Howard and Frances Keller Endowed Professor in the Department of History, was named an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

Max Lieblich, assistant professor of mathematics, has received an NSF CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF awards these prestigious grants to "junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations." Lieblich will use the grant to fund mathematics outreach in the Pacific Northwest, a conference for new PhDs, and research done by himself and graduate students on the Brauer group in formal and algebraic geometry.

Karl Potter, professor emeritus of philosophy, has been awarded a Padma Shri for 2011, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India. Usually awarded to citizens of India to recognize their distinguished contribution in various spheres of activity including the arts, education, industry, literature, science, sports, medicine, social service, and public life, it is occasionally awarded non-citizens like Potter, who have contributed in various ways to India.

John Wellner, professor of statistics and biostatistics, has been selected for the Noether Senior Scholar Award from the American Statistical Association. The award is given each year to a distinguished senior researcher/teacher in nonparametric statistics. In addition to the award, the recipient delivers an invited lecture.

Return to Table of Contents, March 2011 issue