Brown faculty members earn prestigious recognitions

Awards, fellowships and grants come in honor of accomplishments in research, teaching and service.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — From international awards to fellowships and grants in support of their scholarship, Brown faculty members from across the disciplines earned an array of recent recognitions for outstanding research, teaching and service. Among those from late spring and early summer were the following honors:

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, professor of modern culture and media and professor of the history of art and architecture, and Paul Guyer, the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy, earned Berlin Prize fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin. The prize enables fellows from the humanities, social sciences and arts to pursue independent projects for a semester in Germany. Chun will investigate the persistence and transformation of categories of race, gender, class and sexuality in the era of network analytics, and Guyer will examine the legacy of the Enlightenment and the intellectual exchange between Mendelssohn and Kant.

James W. Head III, the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences, was awarded the Shoemaker Distinguished Lunar Scientist Medal by the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. The award is given annually to recognize scientists who have made significant contributions to lunar science over the course of a career. Head began his career by training the Apollo astronauts in the geology of the Moon and continues to work with international collaborators to further the study of lunar science.

Alexander Jaworski, assistant professor of neuroscience, earned an $80,000 award from the Fay/Frank Seed Grant program to launch the initial phase of research to uncover how sensory information is relayed to different areas of the brain. This work, the Brain Research Foundation noted in awarding the grant, will provide important insights into the circuitry that processes sensory information and will deliver new tools for the mapping of brain circuits to the scientific community.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers awarded Kyung-Suk Kim, professor of engineering, with the Daniel C. Drucker Medal in recognition of his contributions to applied mechanics and mechanical engineering. Kim has pioneered the area of “ruga mechanics,” the study of how wrinkles, creases, folds and other structures develop in materials at small scales.

The American Medical Association honored Dr. Adam Levine, associate professor of emergency medicine, for his global health work with the Dr. Nathan Davis International Award in Medicine, named for the AMA’s founder. In recent years, Dr. Levine has responded to humanitarian emergencies in Haiti, Libya, South Sudan and Liberia, where he treated patients as a primary investigator of the Ebola Research Team for International Medical Corps. He has led research and training initiatives in Zambia, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics, has been named one of four 2016 Distinguished Fellows by the American Economic Association, a leading scholarly and professional organization. The AEA cited Loury for four decades of “groundbreaking contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics and labor economics” as well as his particularly influential work on affirmative action.

Susan Miller, research professor of health services, policy and practice, will receive this fall the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Public Health Association’s Aging and Public Health section. The award is presented to an outstanding individual who has made a significant contribution to public service, scholarship or science in the areas of geriatrics and gerontology. Miller focuses her research on nursing home end-of-life care and long-term care quality and utilization.

The Gerontological Society of America chose Vincent Mor, Florence Pirce Grant University Professor of Community Health in the School of Public Health, as the 2016 recipient of the Robert W. Kleemeier Award. The GSA gives the honor each year to a member in recognition of outstanding research in the field of gerontology. For almost four decades, Mor has studied the quality, costs, and outcomes of hospice and nursing home care experienced by the aged and chronically ill.

Julio Ortega, professor of Hispanic studies, was nominated as a corresponding foreign scholar by the Real Academia Española (RAE) — the Spanish Royal Academy. Founded in 1713, the institution is charged with safeguarding the correct use of the Spanish language. The Madrid-based RAE nominated members from outside of Spain for the first time in 2016, and Ortega’s membership to the body comes in the wake of his research and scholarship on Spanish language and literature.

Two faculty members — Anastasia Volovich, professor of physics, and Casey Dunn, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology — were named among 31 finalists for Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists out of a pool of 308 nominees. The annual Blavatnik Awards, administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, celebrate exceptional young researchers who drive the next generation of scientific innovation by answering the most complex scientific questions of today.