Awards & More

Dan Bartholomae, Pitt’s executive associate athletic director, has been elected president of the National Association for Athletics Compliance (NAAC) for 2015-16. NAAC, the professional and educational association of senior compliance administrators in collegiate athletics, comprises more than 1,000 members from Divisions I, II, and III colleges and universities. Bartholomae’s responsibilities include administering the governance and compliance program for Pitt’s 19 intercollegiate sports, overseeing athletic scholarships and financial aid, and administering the football program, facilities planning, and equipment services. 

David J. Birnbaum has been awarded the Marin Drinov medal, the Bulgarian Academy of Science’s highest honor for foreign scholars. Birnbaum, chair and professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has been developing software to enable researchers to use digital libraries to easily manage and analyze Slavic literature based on text linguistics and history.

President Barack Obama appointed Yuan Chang, Distinguished Professor of Pathology in Pitt’s School of Medicine, to serve on the National Cancer Advisory Board. The 18-member board advises the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute. Chang joined Pitt School of Medicine in 2002 after she and Patrick S. Moore, an American Cancer Society Professor in Pitt’s Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, discovered Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpes virus, which causes the most common malignancy occurring in AIDS patients. 

School of Nursing Dean Jacqueline Dunbar-Jacob has named associate professors Susan Cohen and Dianxu Ren as recipients of the Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Awards. Cohen was honored for her devotion to mentoring graduate students. Ren was recognized for his dedication to teaching the difficult course of statistics. The dean’s awards recognize faculty members who best represent the school’s commitment to excellence in teaching. 

Steven Little has been elected a Class of 2015 Fellow by the Biomedical Engineering Society. Little is an associate professor, CNG Faculty Fellow and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, He holds eight U.S. patents and provisional applications for patents and has authored or coauthored 70 articles in prestigious journals in his field.

Lori A. Shutter, a professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Critical Care Medicine, and Gabriella Gosman, an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, have been chosen to participate in the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women. Offered through Drexel University’s College of Medicine, the prestigious fellowship is designed for senior women faculty who demonstrate potential for assuming executive leadership positions within academic health centers.  

Pitt’s DiscoverU Day Program received the Innovation in Program Development Award from the Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers. DiscoverU is a collaboration among Pitt’s Office of Career Development and Placement Assistance and New Student Orientation coordinators. The program, which seeks to help first- and second-year students determine career aspirations, arranges visits to offices in various industries in Pittsburgh. 

Courtney Weikle-Mills, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Children’s Literature Program, has been awarded the Honor Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association. The award—which recognizes outstanding contributions to children’s literary criticism, history, and scholarship—was granted for Weikle-Mills’ 2013 book Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).