Triumphs and transitions
IU Bloomington
Evolutionary biologist and Distinguished Professor Michael Lynch has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced from its 146th annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Fellowship in the NAS is considered by some to be the highest honor afforded in American science. According to the academy, election recognizes "distinguished achievements in original research," as well as scholarly prowess. He has made numerous contributions to the field of evolutionary genomics, which studies how large segments of DNA and even whole chromosomes are organized, as well as how large-scale organization has changed as the result of natural selection—and also "neutral," random and undirected processes. Among his many accomplishments are a theory accounting for genetic duplication, pioneering work in ecological genetics and extensive work on mutation rates, including the "mutational meltdown" model that builds on the work of IU geneticist and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller. Lynch's election brings IU's number of NAS fellows to 10, and the state of Indiana's total 12.
Mathematics professor Jacob "Koby" Rubinstein has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is among 486 individuals awarded membership by the AAAS this year for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science. The new science fellows were recognized during the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago on Feb. 14. Rubinstein's primary research fields are related to the study of differential equations, asymptotic analysis, continuum mechanics, vision and optics. He has wide interests in pure and applied mathematics and has made fundamental contributions to the use of mathematics in the design of lenses and other optical devices as well as to the mathematical theory of superconductivity. The tradition of AAAS fellows began in 1874.
Little more than a week after election as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Douglas Hofstadter, Distinguished Professor of cognitive science, was elected a fellow of the American Philosophical Society. With the honor, Hofstadter becomes the first faculty member in IU history to hold fellowships in the two prestigious societies and to have won a Pulitzer Prize, placing him among a group of 16 people worldwide with the same distinction. That group includes Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, three-time Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman and historians David Brion Davis of Yale, David M. Kennedy of Stanford and Oscar Handlin, retired from Harvard.
Janet Rabinowitch, director of the IU Press, has been named one of the top 50 women in book publishing by Book Business magazine. The inaugural list recognizes and honors leaders in the industry who influence how publishing companies do business as well as what and how consumers read. The women selected represent various segments of the publishing industry from educational publishers and university presses to the world's largest trade houses. Rabinowitch's tip for success: "Balance the big picture and the daily detail, and manage to keep on top of both." Carol Reidy, president and CEO of Simon and Schuster Inc.; Nan Talese, senior vice president of Doubleday and publisher/editorial director of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday at Random House Inc.; and Ellie Berger, president of Trade Publishing at Scholastic Inc., are also among the honorees: http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/article/i-book-business-i-honors-leading-female-executives-helping-shape-industry-406759_1.html.
The Jacob School of Music's Distinguished Professor Menahem Pressler will accept a 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Edison Foundation on behalf of the Beaux Art Trio at the annual Edison Klassiek Gala June 11 in The Hague. The Edison Award is the oldest and most prestigious music award in the Netherlands, comparable to a Grammy. The awards ceremony at the Ridderzaal (Knight's Hall) will be aired live on national television and will include a short solo piano performance by Pressler.
The Office for Women's Affairs honored its annual award recipients May 11 at the Indiana Memorial Union. Receiving awards were Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor of psychological and brain sciences, the OWA Distinguished Scholar Award; Felisha Legette-Jack, head coach of the women's basketball team, the OWA Distinguished Staff Award; and Iris Rosa, director of the African American Dance Company, the OWA Living Legend Award. Indira Dammu, Robyn Coleman and Abigail Skinner received the Women of Vision Student Leadership Awards.
David Clemmer, the Robert and Marjorie Mann Chair of chemistry, has been named the 2009 Tracy M. Sonneborn Award winner, and Lisa Pratt, professor of geological sciences, will be the inaugural Provost's Professor, a new titled appointment previously known as the Chancellor's Professor. Clemmer will give the Sonneborn lecture early in the fall semester, which will be followed immediately by a reception for Pratt and Clemmer. The Clemmer group's invention of ion mobility/time-of-flight mass spectrometry has inspired a number of start-up companies. Pratt is director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute's "Detection of Bio-sustainable Energy and Nutrient Cycling in the Deep Subsurface of Earth and Mars" project, which is funded with a grant of $5 million anchored at IU. With IU's Carl Bauer, the Class of '54 Endowed Professor at the IUB Department of Biology, Pratt leads "Life at the Edge of Hydration," funded with an award of $1 million from the Packard Foundation. She was also recently named one of 12 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars for 2009-2010.
Chemistry professor Krishnan Raghavachari has been awarded the 2009 Davisson-Germer Prize by the American Physical Society, which was presented in March at the society's annual meeting in March. The award recognizes and encourages outstanding work in surface physics. Also a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he received the biennial award for his development and application of quantum chemical methods to silicon surface reactions.
Chemistry professor Daniel Mindiola is the recipient of a 2009 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award for which he will receive a 45,000-euro prize (US $56,600) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He also will be given the opportunity to work with some of Germany's best chemists during 11 months. The award is given to no more than 25 scientists annually who are internationally renowned in their field, who completed their doctorates less than 12 years ago and who in future are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements which will have a seminal influence on their discipline beyond their immediate field of work. He looks at how substances usually thought of as waste or useless can be imbued with utility. Mindiola's group is looking at how depleted uranium 238, a weakly radiogenic isotope of uranium nuclear waste, can be transformed into something useful, such as a source of energy or a catalyst. He is also looking at how chemicals that interact with light might be used to transform CO2 into commodity products or generate oxygen (O2) cheaply and efficiently from environmentally benign and abundant resources such as water.
English professors John Schilb and Andrew Miller were recognized with prestigious national awards last semester. Schilb, the Culbertson Chair of writing, received the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the Modern Language Association for Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences' Expectations (Southern Illinois University Press), and Miller was awarded the Donald Gray Prize, in honor of the IU English professor emeritus, from the North American Victorian Studies Association for "Lives Unled in Realist Fiction" (Representations 98, 2007: 118-134).
SPEA's Kurt Zorn is serving as associate vice provost for undergraduate education for the Bloomington campus. He is overseeing University Division matters relating to dual credit; working with the director of athletic development to coordinate programs that support the campus' student-athletes and other initiatives related to curricular development.
Bill Brown, a leading Indiana figure in the design and construction of environmentally sustainable buildings, was named the first director of sustainability on the Bloomington campus in February. He had been an associate partner since 2006 with Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Architects. Responsible for library design and marketing for the 55-person Indianapolis firm, he was Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) consultant on 10 projects in the past two years, including two projects with zero net energy consumption.
Composition professor Jeffrey Hass of the Jacobs School has received a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship to live and work at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities on the Mediterranean coast south of Genoa, Italy. Hass, who also serves as director of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music at the Jacobs School of Music, will begin the fellowship in September. The fellowship announcement follows three other honors for Hass, including a $17,000 IU New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities grant; first prize and an orchestral commission for a work for the 2009 Utah Arts Festival in Salt Lake City; and having a piece accepted for performance at the 2009 conference of the International Computer Music Association in Montreal in August.
McGraw-Hill has published the 14th edition of Business Law: The Ethical, Global and E-Commerce Environment, by Kelley School of Business professors Jane Mallor, Tom Bowers, Arlen Langvardt and Maurer School of Law professor Jim Barnes, who is the senior author on the edition and has been a co-author since 1970. The textbook is widely used in business schools.
In April, the Maurer School of Law hosted the 2009 Critical Tax Conference, which was partially sponsored by Tax Analysts. The annual event is a gathering of tax law scholars who are interested in exploring tax issues from perspectives that go beyond conventional public economics analysis of taxation. The conference involved approximately 30 tax faculty from U.S. and foreign law schools, as well as keynote speaker Joshua Odintz, tax counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance. Professors Leandra Lederman, Ajay Mehrotra, Bill Popkin and Archana Sridhar, assistant dean for research and special projects, each moderated a panel at the conference, and Lederman and Mehrotra each presented an early-stage research idea in an "incubator" brainstorming session. Also in April, law professor Bill Henderson and Sridhar organized FutureFirm 1.0, a two-day competition held in April. The competition, hosted by the IU Maurer School of Law, charged participants with creating a business model for a fictional law firm that would not only survive the current economic downturn, but thrive 20 years into the future. Participants were law firm partners, associates and clients; business leaders and in-house counsel; and law students from across the country. The winning team proposed an increased focus on workplace culture and a target client base of small and mid-sized businesses, and the team was awarded $9,000 for its proposal. Also in April, Mehrotra presented his paper, "The Public Control of Corporate Power: Revisiting the 1909 U.S. Corporate Tax from a Comparative Perspective," at Northern Kentucky University's Salmon P. Chase College of Law.
Feisal Istrabadi, visiting professor at the Maurer School of Law and a former Iraqi deputy ambassador to the U.N., attended a meeting of experts proposing a draft U.N. Convention on Crimes against Humanities in April. The meeting was organized by the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at the Washington University School of Law, St. Louis, and co-sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace, the International Law Association and the American Society of International Law. He presented a paper on a panel, "Drafting New Law and Policy, Implementing New Law in the Courtroom," at a symposium, "Building Justice: Developing the Rule of Law through Judicial and Law Enforcement Training," sponsored by the International Human Rights Law Institute, DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. The symposium launched a new journal, the DePaul Rule of Law Journal. Istrabadi also presented a paper on Iraq on April 24 at a conference, Diapora-Government Relations, hosted by the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. (co-author with Rend al-Rahim). The paper will be published in a book by the USIP Press. Istrabadi's article, "A Constitution without Constitutionalism: Reflections on Iraq's Failed Constitutional Process," goes to press in June in Vol. 87 of the Texas Law Review. Istrabadi's forthcoming chapter, "Islam and the State in the Iraqi Interim and Permanent Constitutions," is scheduled for publication later this year in Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries (Rainer Grote and Tilman Röder, eds. Oxford University Press).
Tijen Demirel-Pegg and James Moskowitz of the Department of Political Science are the authors of "US Aid Allocation: The Nexus of Human Rights, Democracy, and Development," published in the Journal of Peace Research.
http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/46/2/181
Political scientist Elinor Ostrom's "Engaging with Impossibilities and Possibilities" has been published in Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Vol. II: Society, Institutions and Development, Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur, editors, (New York: Oxford University Press).
IU's public radio and TV stations, WFIU and WTIU, were honored last month with 21 awards from the Indiana Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Daniel Robison, assistant news director, and Stan Jastrzebski, news director, combined to sweep all three places in the Best Radio Writing category and were named co-winners of the Best Radio Use of Sound competition. Robison and WFIU reporter Arianna Prothero took home the plaques for Best Radio Feature in both the professional and student divisions, while WTIU reporter Kyle Mitchell won the Best Television Feature award in the student division. Ann Shea, WFIU/WTIU news bureau chief, along with Jo Throckmorton from Blue Ace Media, took home the plaque for Best Social Justice Reporting. Complete rundown:
FIRST PLACE: Best Radio Writing--"Indebted to Debs," Daniel Robison; Best Radio Use of Sound--Political Drinks" and "Breaking Bones, Breaking Away," Stan Jastrzebski and Daniel Robison (co-winners); Best Radio Feature--"Remembering Evan Farrell," Daniel Robison; Best Radio Spot News--"June Flooding," WFIU News Team; Best Radio Election Night Coverage--"Election Night 2008," WFIU News Team; Best Coverage of Children's Issues --Undercover Planned Parenthood Videos," Stan Jastrzebski; Best Student News Feature--"Home Buyer Beware," Arianna Prothero; Best Social Justice Reporting--"Hard Life," Ann Shea and Jo Throckmorton; Best Student Television Feature--"Youth Vote," Kyle Mitchell; and Best Television Election Night Coverage--"IU Election Night," Dave Leno and Chad Stum. SECOND PLACE: Best Radio Coverage of Minority Issues--"Homeless GLBT Youth," Cliff Gagliardo; Best Radio Feature--"Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys," Adam Schwartz; Best Radio Documentary--"Denver Smith, 25 Years Later," Daniel Robison; Best Radio Writing--"Mark Kruzan, Poet Mayor," Stan Jastrzebski; Best Radio Continuing Coverage--"Men's Basketball Sanctions," Stan Jastrzebski and Daniel Robison; Best Radio Coverage of Government--"Property Tax Challenges," Stan Jastrzebski; and Best Television Sports Reporting--"Vintage Baseball at West Baden," Ann Shea and Jason Pear. THIRD PLACE: Best Television Coverage of Minority Issues--"Indiana Legends: George Taliaferro," Rob Anderson; Best Radio Writing--"Breaking Bones, Breaking Away," Daniel Robison; and Best Radio Continuing Coverage--"June Flooding," WFIU News Team. Listen to the winning stories online: http://www.newsmatters.org/wfiuwtiu-news-department-wins-21-spj-awards/.
Two new teaching awards related to sustainability and environmental literacy -- the Sustainability Course Development Fellowships and the Sustainability and Environmental Literacy Leadership Award -- were awarded this semester by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. The first Sustainability Course Development Fellowships have been awarded to Tim Bartley, Department of Sociology; Melissa Clark, School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Jeffery McMullen, Kelley School of Business; and Phaedra Pezzullo and Jennifer Meta Robinson, Department of Communication and Culture. The first Sustainability and Environmental Literacy Leadership Award has been given to Richard Wilk, departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies, and Peter Todd, Cognitive Science Program and School of Informatics.
The NEH has awarded $400,000 over two years to the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project -- InPhO for short -- which is creating interactive, digital tools to help students and scholars explore the discipline of philosophy. Colin Allen, professor of history and philosophy of science, is project director for InPhO, which was begun in the 2005-06 academic year with support, in part, from a New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities grant. Allen said the new NEH grant will enable InPhO to expand its development of more attractive and effective ways of presenting data and information.
Four new multidisciplinary ventures have been selected by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs to provide funding during the academic year. The venture are:
• Media@IU -- A workshop proposed by Mark Deuze and Steve Krahnke of the Department of Telecommunications; Ted Striphas, Ilana Gershon and Max Dawson of the Department of Communication and Culture; and Mike Conway, and Craig Wood of the School of Journalism. The goal of the workshop is to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students involved in media production and the Indiana Media Industry Network: http://www.indiana.edu/~telecom/people/faculty/deuze.shtml.
• Culture, Environmental Health and Movement in the Dominican Alps: Community-integrated Trans-disciplinary Workshops in the Applied Sociomedical Sciences at Indiana University, proposed by Fernando Ona, Robert Goodman and Zobeida Bonilla (Applied Health Science); Geoffrey Conrad and Michael Muehlenbein (Anthropology); and David Koceja (Kinesiology). The goal of this project is to establish a trans-disciplinary global health research initiative in the highlands of the Dominican Republic between IU and academic and community counterparts in the Dominican Republic. Additional financial support comes from HPER and the USAID Cluster.
http://homepages.indiana.edu/sb/page/normal/1351.html
• Building Sustainable Food Knowledge and Practices: An Interdisciplinary Seminar Series, proposed by Catherine Tucker (Anthropology); Christine Barbour (Political Science); Rinku Roy Chowdhury (Geography); and Benjamin Schultz (Marketing). The seminar series will bring food researchers and activists to Bloomington to share their knowledge of food production, consumption and distribution systems, and experience in building sustainable food practices and networks. Additional financial support comes from the departments of Political Science, Anthropology, and Geography, as well as a Sustainability and Environmental Literacy Leadership Award.
http://www.indiana.edu/~anthro/people/faculty/tucker.html
• The Miloevi Trial: An Autopsy, proposed by David Ransel (History) and Timothy Waters (Maurer School of Law). The conference will allow for scholarly exchange between practitioners in North America, Western Europe and the Balkans, and result in an edited volume, including papers and comments from participants. Additional support for the conference comes from the Russian and East European Institute, the Maurer School of Law and the West European Studies Center.
http://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/faculty/ransel.shtml
http://homepages.indiana.edu/sb/page/normal/1428.html
For more information on fund eligibility and the application process, go to this web site: http://www.indiana.edu/~vpfaa/grants.shtml or E-mail vpfaa@indiana.edu.
The Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research has a new leadership team, according to director Fred Cate, Distinguished Professor of law. Key appointees are Kay Connelly, assistant professor of computer science who as senior associate director will provide greater coordination for all of CACR's activities and oversee its internal programs and its expanding work in health information security and privacy; Steven Wallace, director of the Advanced Network Management Lab, will serve as associate director to enhance cooperation between cybersecurity faculty, the lab and other IU resources, such as Internet2; William Barnett, associate director, is also senior manager for life sciences in the research technologies office of University Information Technology Services and director of the Advanced IT Core at the IU School of Medicine; and Mark Bruhn, associate director responsible for interaction with IU technology, security and policy office, and outreach to other colleges and universities. He is associate vice president for information and infrastructure assurance. Scott Orr continues as the associate director responsible for relations between IU Bloomington and IUPUI.
Lane Baker, professor of chemistry, has been selected as a recipient of an NSF Early Career Award. The National Science Foundation honors outstanding junior faculty members in science and engineering nationwide with the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. Awards range in amount from $300,000 to $600,000 and in duration from four to five years.
The Ronald A. Hites Award for an Outstanding Research Publication in JASMS (Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry) has been announced by the AMS president. The journal is the leader of mass spectrometry journals in circulation and is also the leading mass spectrometry journal in impact factor for original research publications. Hites, an IU Distinguished Professor, is the former president of ASMS when the journal was conceived and is the person most responsible for its existence. Because Hite's vision in establishing the society journal was so important for its inception, the current ASMS Board of Directors voted to name the award for him. https://www.asms.org.
Steven Ray, professor of chemistry, has been invited to join the editorial board of Spectrochimica Acta, Part B. The honor also brings distinction for the entire Hieftje Research Group.
