Awards & More

The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences has published a double issue of Scripta & e-Scripta: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Mediaeval Studies in honor of David J. Birnbaum on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Birnbaum is a professor and chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the journal’s editorial board.

Kay Brummond, chair of the Dietrich School’s Department of Chemistry, received the 2015 Pittsburgh Award from the Pittsburgh Section of the American Chemical Society. The award was established in 1932 to recognize outstanding leadership in chemical affairs in the local and larger professional community.

Three members of the University of Pittsburgh community have received Pitt’s 2015 Iris Marion Young Award for Political Engagement in recognition of their dedication to social activism in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Robin Clarke, a lecturer in Pitt’s Department of English; Marko Gudic, a senior majoring in economics, politics, and philosophy; and Abigail Yochum, a joint degree student in the University’s School of Law and School of Social Work, were honored during an Oct. 22 ceremony at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association in Oakland. The award is named for the late Iris Marion Young, an internationally renowned philosopher, social theorist, and activist for gender equity who served as a faculty member in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in the 1990s.

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán has been named editor-in-chief of Latin American Research Review, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes original research and surveys of current research on Latin America and the Caribbean. The journal is the official scholarly publication of the Latin American Studies Association, with an international membership of more than 12,000. His position began Jan. 1, and he will supervise issues published after 2016. Pérez-Liñán is a professor and the director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. He also is a member of the core faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies within Pitt’s University Center for International Studies. 

Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels, a film by Distinguished Professor of History Marcus Rediker, has been awarded the 2015 Richard E. O’Connor prize by the American Historical Association for the best historical documentary of the year. Rediker accepted the award this month in Atlanta, Ga., at the AHA’s annual meeting, which included a special screening of the film.

The Pittsburgh Genome Resource Repository won an HPCWire 2015 Readers Choice Award at the annual International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis in Austin, Tex., in November. The award was for Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics. The repository is a collaboration among the Pitt-Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and the Institute for Personalized Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It is a leading-edge information technology resource for storing, accessing, and analyzing large national datasets, including the Cancer Genome Atlas from the National Institutes of Health. Such datasets do not include patient names and are important for the development of personalized medicine, which uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. HPCwire is published by Tabor Communications and covers the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry.

Judith Chun-Hsu Yang, a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, received two grants totaling $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation for research that will challenge classical theories of oxidation. By using electron microscopy capable of observing changes in real time, Yang will analyze the effects of oxidation on copper and the nano-structure of other metals used in a variety of industries.