Awards, Honors & Professorships

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09/20/2016 September 2016 Perspectives
Honorary Awards
Publication Awards
Other Accomplishments

Honorary Awards

Katherine Beckett, professor of sociology and Clarence and Elissa M. (“Lee”) Schrag Endowed Faculty Fellow, and Rachel Klevit, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, were among the dozen UW faculty elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences for “their outstanding record of scientific achievement and willingness to work on behalf of the academy in bringing the best available science to bear on issues within the state of Washington.”

AJ Boydston, assistant professor of chemistry, has been named a 2016 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The Foundation’s teacher-scholar awards support the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences, providing discretionary funding of $75,000 to faculty at an early stage in their careers who have demonstrated a commitment to both research and teaching.

Leah Ceccarelli, professor of communication, received the National Communication Association's Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, a career award that honors scholars who have executed research programs in rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, and/or public address studies.

Sarah Keller, professor of chemistry and adjunct professor of physics, will receive the 2017 Avanti Award in Lipids in recognition of her contributions to the understanding of phase behavior of multicomponent lipid membranes. Avanti Polar Lipids, Inc. established this award to recognize an investigator for outstanding contributions to our understanding of lipid biophysics.

Todd London, executive director and professor in the School of Drama and Floyd U. Jones Family Endowed Chair in Drama, has received an honorary doctorate from DePaul University’s Schools of Theatre and Music in Chicago.

Ross Matsueda, professor of sociology, has been named the 2016 winner of the American Society of Criminology's Sutherland Award, which recognizes "outstanding contributions to theory or research in criminology on the etiology of criminal and deviant behavior, the criminal justice system, corrections, law, or justice."

Andrew Meltzoff, the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair, co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and professor of psychology, has been awarded the Kurt Koffka Medal. Bestowed each year by Giessen University in Germany, the award honors scientists who have "advanced the fields of perception or developmental psychology to an extraordinary extent." Recognizing Meltzoff's work on infant social cognition, the Koffka award committee cited Meltzoff's achievements in the fields of developmental, perceptual, and cognitive psychology with far reaching implications for cognitive science, robotics, educational psychology, and philosophy of mind.

Kathy Mork, graduate program coordinator in the Department of English, has been named the 2016 UW Distinguished Graduate Program Advisor. The Department notes that Mork “has been, for 34 years, the epicenter of the English Department graduate program, helping nearly 200 graduate students every year navigate admissions, graduate study benchmarks, and paperwork.  She is someone students confide in and come to for career advice; she is constantly looking out for funding opportunities; she is centrally involved in all aspects of the graduate program’s success.”

Patricia Moy, professor of communication and Christy Cressey Endowed Professor, was appointed as an ICA Fellow, the International Communication Association’s highest honor for career contributions to the study of human communication.

Sharlene Santana, assistant professor of biology, received the 2016 Carl Gans Award from the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biologists, given to an outstanding young investigator for distinguished contributions to the field of comparative biomechanics.

Abigail Swann, assistant professor of biology, and Bianca Viray, assistant professor of mathematics, have received CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation. CAREER awards recognize “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.”

Stephen Turnovsky, professor of economics and Ford and Louisa Van Voorhis Professor in Political Economy, will be acknowledged this fall with a Jubilee Honour by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, in recognition of four decades of Fellowship in the Academy. Turnovsky is one of few overseas Fellows (less than four percent) in the Academy.

Emilio Zagheni, assistant professor of sociology, received the 2016 Trailblazer Award for Demographic Analysis, awarded every two years by the Council of the European Association for Population Studies to honor outstanding achievements by an individual scholar in the development and application of the methods of demographic analysis, including mathematical and bio-demography. The award committee cited Zagheni’s work in innovative data science approaches for demography, and the use of formal demographic methods.

Publication Awards

Michael Burns, lecturer in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, and colleagues Carolyn Baylor, Helene Starks, Kathryn Yorkston, and Brian Dudgeon (all but the last from the UW),  received an Editors' Award from the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology for their article “Asking the Stakeholders: Perspectives of Individuals with Aphasia, Their Family Members, and Physicians Regarding Communication in Medical Interactions.”  The award recognizes  the journal’s “most impactful works that meet the highest quality standards in research design and presentation."

Radhika Govindrajan, assistant professor of anthropology, was awarded the Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship Award from the American Anthropological Association’s General Anthropology Division for her paper "The Goat that Died for Family.”

Richard B. Kielbowicz, assistant professor of communication, received the 32nd Annual Covert Award in Mass Communication History for his article “Regulating Timeliness: Technologies, Laws, and the News, 1840-1970” in Journalism and Communication Monographs, 17 (Spring 2015): 5-83.

Eric Zivot, Robert R. Richards Endowed Chair in Economics, and alumna Nina Sidneva (PhD, 2008), have been awarded the inaugural Rollie Lamberson Medal for the most outstanding paper in natural resource modeling published within the last two years. Their paper, "Evaluating the Impact of Environmental Policy on the Trend Behavior of US Emissions of Nitrogen Oxides and Volatile Organic Compounds," was published in the journal Natural Resource Modeling in September 2014.

Other Accomplishments

Christian Lee Novetzke, associate professor and associate director of the Jackson School of International Studies and chair/director of the Center for Global Studies, has been elected to the American Society for the Study of Religion. 

Ken Tadashi Oshima, chair of Japan Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies and professor of architecture, has been named president of the Society of Architectural Historians, the international organization based in Chicago. He is the first president from the University of Washington and the first president with a focus on Asian architecture.

Scott Radnitz, associate professor of international studies and chair/director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, was appointed to the Kennan Institute Advisory Council for a five-year term at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

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