Awards & more

Freddie Fu received the George D. Rovere Award for education at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine meeting in Seattle. The annual award recognizes a society member’s contribution to sports-medicine education. Fu is the David Silver Professor and Chair of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and founder of the UPMC Center for Sports Medicine.

Bita Moghaddam, professor of neuroscience in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, recently became the first woman to win the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology’s Lilly Neuroscience Basic Research Award. She studies the neuronal mechanisms that maintain cognitive and emotional functions in brain regions implicated in schizophrenia, ADHD, anxiety, and addictive disorders. Moghaddam’s work has led to the discovery of the first non-monoamine-targeting compound for the treatment of schizophrenia. 

Two Pitt Department of Philosophy doctoral candidates have won prestigious fellowships for their dissertations. Katharina Nieswandt (A&S ’14) won a 2014 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and its $25,000 prize for her dissertation, “In What Sense Are Rights Conventional?” The thesis explores whether people discovered or invented moral rights. Preston Stovall won an American Council of Learned Society’s 2013-14 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion fellowship, which provides a $30,000 stipend. His dissertation is titled “Existence, Essence, and Excellence: Kind Terms, Modal Operators, and the Subjunctive Conditional.”

The Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law and Public Policy has recognized two Pitt School of Law students with its annual awards for service. Elizabeth Orton, a May 2014 graduate of the School of Law, is the 2014 recipient of the Dick Thornburgh Prize for Legal Service. The prize is given to a student who has worked to help low-income individuals through a legal services organization while in law school and who intends to continue on this career path. During her time at the School of Law, Orton worked as an intern in the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office and also as a certified legal intern for the Pitt School of Law’s Family Law Clinic. David R. Coogan, who also graduated from the School of Law in May 2014, received the 2014 J. Evans Rose, Jr. Prize for Public Service. The prize
 was created to honor Rose, an esteemed Pittsburgh lawyer and a Pitt trustee for 26 years, and is presented to a student whose goal is to pursue a career in public service. Prior to attending law school, Coogan served as a Marine Corps intelligence officer, completing combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his time at the School of Law, Coogan worked as a student intern in the U.S. Attorney’s office and as a judicial intern for Lisa Pupo Lenihan, chief magistrate judge for the United States District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania, among other positions. 

The Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER) has elected Jinx Walton chair of its board of directors for the next two years. Walton, Pitt’s chief information officer, previously served as the organization’s vice chair. Established in 2010 through a grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, KINBER is a nonprofit membership organization that provides broadband connectivity and promotes the innovative use of digital technologies among education, healthcare, economic development, libraries, public media, and other institutions.

The University of Pittsburgh’s European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center (EUCE/ESC) won the 2014 EUCE Outstanding Activity Award for Conversations on Europe, a virtual roundtable series that allows members of the Pitt and local communities to discuss European-centered topics with other students and experts across the U.S. and Europe. The award marks the second time in three years that Pitt’s center has won the Outstanding Outreach Activity Award. The award competition is run by the EUCE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

PopCity Media named Pitt’s Steven Little as one of “five Pittsburghers shaking up the status quo and reshaping our world.” Little is a professor and chair of chemical and petroleum engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. The weekly online magazine noted that Little’s lab is working “with the human body at the cellular and molecular level to regenerate tissues and to control immune system response.”