June 2019 Kudos

June 6, 2019

Elizabeth Acevedo, BA ’10, (Interdisciplinary Studies) was profiled in the Atlantic article “Elizabeth Acevedo’s Work Is a Welcome Rarity in Young-Adult Fiction.”

Tara Behrend (Organizational Sciences and Communication) co-authored “Person-vocation fit across the world of work: Evaluating the generalizability of the circular model of vocational interests and social cognitive career theory across 74 countries” in the Journal of Vocational Behavior.

Jeffrey Blount (Media and Public Affairs) authored the novel The Emancipation of Evan Walls (Koehler Books, 2019).

Claire Besson (Chemistry) was awarded the Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses.

Nemata Blyden (History) authored the book African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019).

Diane Cline (History) wrote the report “The Connected World of Potters in Ancient Athens: Collaborations, Connoisseurship, and Social Network Analysis” for the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies

Sara Goldrick-Rab, BA ’98, (Sociology) was featured in the U.S. News & World Report article “Measuring College Food Insecurity.”

Kimberly Gross (Media and Public Affairs) hosted the International Communication Association (ICA) pre-conference event “Political Communication Division Student Preconference” and chaired the ICA conference session “Emotions in Political Communication.”

Valentina Harizanov (Mathematics) chaired the Program Committee for the 2019 Winter Meeting of the Association of Symbolic Logic in Baltimore, Md. She was also the co-organizer of the American Institute of Mathematics workshop Definability and Decidability Problems in Number Theory in San Jose, Calif.

MA student Courtland Ingraham (History) presented two papers: “Public Trust, Party Leadership and Unbossing the Gilded Age: How Grover Cleveland Built the Tradition of the President's Role as Party Leader” at the American Political History Institute's Graduate Conference at Boston University, and “The Decline of Deutsch: A Study on the Declining Use of German in America through the German-American Community of Albany” at the Society of German American Studies (SGAS) symposium.

Kaitlin Jencso, BFA ’12, (Fine Art Photography) was profiled in the BmoreArt article “Kaitlin Jencso’s Transformations of the Mundane in the Digital Era.”

Neil Johnson (Physics) received a $95,822 grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study complex dynamical systems.

Harrison Jones, MA ’19, (New Media Photojournalism) won the NPPA Student Clip Contest Photographer of the Year.

Oleg Kargaltsev (Physics) was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Smithsonian Institution and NASA-Goddard to discover compact objects such as black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs in intermediate globular stellar clusters.

David Karpf (Media and Public Affairs) chaired the International Communication Association conference sessions “Datafication and the Welfare State” and “Media Depictions of Politicians.”

Chryssa Kouveliotou (Physics) received a $60,000 grant from NASA-Goddard-LOC and a $43,790 grant from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to observe swift galactic plane survey sources.

William Larson, PhD ’11, (Economics) was featured in the USA Today article “Here's how much an acre of land is worth in each of contiguous 48 states in the US.”

PhD candidate Milorad Lazic (History) wrote the chapter “Comrades in Arms: Yugoslav Military Aid to Liberation Movements of Angola and Mozambique, 1961 - 1976” for the book Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War 'East': Transnational Activism 1960 - 1990 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).

Joel Lewis (Mathematics) received a $42,000 grant from the Simons Foundation for a project titled “Permutations, reflection groups, and factorization combinatorics.” He also received a $5,000 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award.

Hua Liang (Statistics) received a $447,983 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop software for pharmacodynamics and bioassay studies.

Lisa Lipinski (Art History) authored the book René Magritte and the Art of Thinking (Routledge, 2019).

Steven Livingston (Media and Public Affairs) spoke at the “Washington Launch of Media and Mass Atrocity” event by the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He also presented the International Communication Association conference opening plenary session on “Transnational Framing Activation in a Digital Era.”

Ed McCord (History) presented his paper, “Confucius Institutes and Chinese Studies in American Universities” at the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Denver, Colo.

Patricia Phalen (Media and Public Affairs) chaired the “Data, Metrics and Audiences” panel at the International Communication Association conference.

Jozef Pryztycki (Mathematics) received a $42,000 grant from the Simons Foundation for a project connecting Knot Theory concepts.

Nina Gilden Seavey (Media and Public Affairs) and Stephen Higgins’s documentary The Matador was featured at the Southwest Festival of the Arts.

Sanjit Sethi (Arts and Design) was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. for 6.13.89: Canceling of the Mapplethorpe Exhibition.

Sarah Shomstein (Psychology) was awarded the Columbian Prize for Teaching and Mentoring Advanced Undergraduate Students.

L. Courtney Smith (Biology) received a $774,962 grant from the National Science Foundation to study anti-pathogen activities of sea urchin protein.

Cheryl W. Thompson (Media and Public Affairs) was named a Dateline Awards finalist by the Society of Professional Journalists DC Chapter in the Magazine Features category. She also gave a presentation on “The art of the investigative interview” at the Investigative Reporters & Editors New York Watchdog Workshop at Columbia University.

Silvio Waisbord (Media and Public Affairs) hosted the International Communication Association (ICA) pre-conference “Digital Journalism in Latin America” event and participated in several ICA conference sessions.

Christopher Warshaw (Political Science) received a $14,000 grant from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab to create a new database of local legislative and executive elections.