Awards & more

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, a Pitt associate professor of political science and a core faculty member in the Center for Latin American Studies, is a cowinner of the 2014 Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association for his book, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall. The book, which was coauthored with Scott Mainwaring of the University of Notre Dame, offers a comparative analysis of the origins, processes, and outcomes of democratization in the region.

Several faculty members from Pitt’s School of Information Sciences and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences have received an $897,055 award from the National Science Foundation to create a joint curriculum on health care cybersecurity. The project, “A Curriculum for Security Assured Health Informatics,” will aim to prepare professionals to secure the nation’s health-informatics cyberspace. The School of Information Sciences faculty are James Joshi, the grant’s principal investigator, and Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Balaji Palanisamy, Prashant Krishnamurthy, David Tipper, and Michael Spring. School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences faculty members are Bambang Parmanto and Leming Zhou. Rasu Shrestha from UPMC will serve as an industry consultant on the project.

A paper coauthored by Alice Blazeck and Gretchen Zewe, both assistant professors in the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, has been recognized as one of the Top 10 papers of 2014 by the International Society of Simulation in Health Care and was voted “Best Paper” by the International Nurses Association for Clinical Simulated Learning. The paper is titled “Simulating Simulation: Promoting Perfect Practice with Learning Bundle-Supported Videos in an Applied, Learner-Driven Curriculum Design.”