November 2019 Kudos

November 14, 2019

Amina Akhtar, BA '16, (Journalism & Mass Communication) launched an Aspen Institute podcast featuring interviews with Madeleine Albright, health innovators and more.

Taylor Barnes, BA ’12, (Political Communication) was named constituency operations director and women’s political director for the Democratic National Committee.

David Bjelajac (Art History and American Studies) authored the chapter “Freemasonry's ‘Living Stones’ and the Boston Portraiture of John Singleton Copley,” in Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Kate Black, MA ’10, (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) co-authored the book Represent: The Woman’s Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World (Workman Publishing, 2019).

Douglas Boyce (Music) appeared on guitarist Daniel Lippel’s album Mirrored Spaces.

Bill Briscoe (Physics) was reappointed to the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium Authority by Governor Ralph Northam.

Kavita Daiya (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) organized a symposium on Graphic Narratives from South Asia at the 48th Annual Conference on South Asia,  where she presented on “Drawing Migration: Women and Ecologies of Displacement in the Postcolonial State.”

Andrea Dietz (Exhibition Design) designed the MAK Center for Art and Architecture exhibition “Soft Schindler.”

Alexander B. Downes (Political Science) received a $7,500 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense for an empirical analysis for meeting great power challenges.

Evangeline J. Downie (Physics) organized a session on Alternate Career Paths for Nuclear Physics at the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics Annual Meeting.

Keryn Gedan (Biology) received a grant for $19,786 from the U.S. Department of the Interior to study early detection of invasive wetland grass in tidal marsh-forests using laser and GPS technology.

Carl Gudenius (Arts & Design) and Jinwei Dai, MFA ’18, (Production Design) designed the sets for the Washington Stage Guild’s production of Candida and were featured in The Washington Post.

Giselle Hall, Cert ’19, (Documentary Filmmaking) produced a documentary about her experiences in Syria.

Oleg Kargaltsev (Physics) was awarded a $23,330 grant from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to study pulsar wind nebula.

Yahia Lababidi, BA ’96, (English) authored the book Signposts to Elsewhere – A Book of Aphorisms (Hay House, 2019).

Richard Lang, BA ’70, (Fine Arts) debuted his exhibition “As Above, So Below” at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Peter Linquiti (Public Policy & Public Administration) was named an associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.

Harris Mylonas (Political Science) co-authored the scholarly article “Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars” for the journal Ethnopolitics.

Dara Orenstein (American Studies) published the book Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Daniele S. Podini (Forensic Sciences) was awarded a $192,764 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to develop probabilistic genotyping for the forensic DNA marker known as microhaplotypes.

Frank Sesno (Media and Public Affairs) attended the UNFAO’s 46th World Food Security Conference in Rome as part of Planet Forward’s “storytelling expedition.”

Claire Smullen, MA ’12, (Art Education) was one of 40 people nationwide to receive the Milken Educator Award and a $25,000 prize.

Gregory Squires (Public Policy & Public Administration) co-authored the article “Social Movement Research with Whom: Potential Contributions of Community-Based Research Methods” for the Emerald Insight website.

Sophomore Rachel Trauner (Biology) made her professional acting debut at the Keegan Theatre production of West By God, a play by Brandon McCoy (Theatre).

Takae Tsujioka (East Asian Languages & Literatures) received a $20,000 grant from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission for a project on Japanese-learning inspired vision and engagement.

Katherine Marshall Woods (Professional Psychology) appeared on UDC-TV’s A Healthy Mind, along with James Sexton and Cheri Marmarosh