Awards & More

Lina Dostilio has been appointed assistant vice chancellor for community engagement centers at the University of Pittsburgh. Dostilio will join the Office of Community and Governmental Relations this January. Prior to her appointment at Pitt, she held the role of director of the Center for Community-Engaged Teaching and Research at Duquesne University.

“Reimagining community engagement is a critical component of our University’s strategic plan,” said Senior Vice Chancellor for Engagement and Chief of Staff Kathy Humphrey. “Lina is a nationally recognized expert in community-engaged academics, research, and service initiatives, and we are incredibly pleased to have her as a part of our team as we continue to reimagine — and enhance — our University’s community engagement strategy.”

Lauren Russell, assistant director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, has been awarded a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Through the fellowship — which carries a monetary award of $25,000 — Russell plans to further develop a book-length work, tentatively titled Descent. The book is a hybrid work of poems, lyrical essays, images, and documents based on her family history.

Russell is one of 37 writers in the nation to receive the NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowship in 2017. The fellowship program is designed to encourage ascending writers to produce new works of literature and gives fellows the means, space, and time to develop individual projects.

With 17 patents and more than 40 invention disclosures to his name, University of Pittsburgh professor William Wagner has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). According to the NAI, the honor is “the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society.”

In addition to serving as director of Pitt’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wagner is a professor of surgery, bioengineering, and chemical engineering. He also serves as chairman of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society-Americas, deputy director of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Revolutionizing Metallic Biomaterials, and chief scientific officer of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine. Wagner is the third Pitt faculty member to be named an NAI Fellow.