December 2018 Kudos

December 12, 2018

Elizabeth Acevedo, BA ’10, (Interdisciplinary Studies) won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her debut novel, The Poet X.

Senior Kyrah Altman (Human Services and Social Justice) was awarded the D.C. regional Global Student Entrepreneur Award.

Two CCAS alumna were named to the Forbes 2019 30 Under 30 list: Tara Dorfman, BA ’11, (Journalism & Mass Communication) for championing new voices in comedy as a talent agent at Creative Artists Agency; and Sally Nuamah, BA ’11, (Political Science) for founding an organization that provides funding for low-income girls to become the first in their family to attend college.

Susan E. Dudley (Regulatory Studies) was awarded a $150,000 cooperative agreement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to analyze public comments for informing regulatory reform efforts.

Robert Entman (Media and Public Affairs) co-authored “Framing conflicts in digital and transnational media environments” in Media, War & Conflict.

Keryn Gedan (Biology) was awarded a $24,931 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to investigate and plan a novel type of marsh restoration, targeting areas of back-barrier islands that are susceptible to sea level rise and storm impacts.

Kerric Harvey (Media and Public Affairs) premiered her original short play, “Tremble,” at the Rose Murphy Center for the Performing Arts in Sonoma, Calif.

George Howe (Psychology) received a $200,175 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a study to prevent suicide risk in sexual and gender minorities.

PhD candidate Siddharth Kulkarni (Biology) was awarded three grants totaling $11,000 for his research on spiders: the National Geographic Early Career Grant; a Lakeside Grant from the California Academy of Sciences; and the International Society of Arachnology Student Grant.

Mika Natif (Art History) authored the book Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters between Europe and Asia at the Courts of India, 1580-1630 (Brill, 2018).

Weiqun Peng (Physics) received a $598,125 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/National Institutes of Health for research on enzymes that regulate follicular helper T-cells for the human body’s  immune systems.

Ethan Porter (Media and Public Affairs) published the article “The public's dilemma: race and political evaluations of police killings” in Politics, Groups, and Identities. He co-authored the article “Identifying Media Effects Through Low-Cost, Multiwave Field Experiments” in Political Communication with Kimberly Gross (Media and Public Affairs).

PhD candidate Scott Ross (Anthropology) received three grants totaling $29,715 for his dissertation on humanitarian infrastructures in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The awards were: the International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council; a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation); and a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation.

Nina Seavey (History/Media and Public Affairs) was named a senior expert at The Identity Post.

Cheryl W. Thompson (Journalism) spoke at the Budapest American Studies Forum on “Social movements and the Modern Media.”