Awards

	Sue-Ellen Jacobs Receives Mellon Emeritus Fellowship
	Stephen Porter Recognized by Chinese Academy of Sciences
	Other Awards, Honors, and Professorships

Jacobs Receives Mellon Emeritus Fellowship

	Sue-Ellen Jacobs.

Sue-Ellen Jacobs, professor emeritus in the Department of Women Studies, is the first UW faculty member to receive a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mellon Emeritus Fellowships are awarded to outstanding scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who, at the time of taking up the fellowships, are officially retired but continue to be active in research.

Mellon Emeritus Fellowships provide support for research and related expenses. Jacobs will use the funds to finish the Ohkay Owingeh Multimedia Dictionary and Cultural Research Project, an effort to preserve the culture and endangered Tewa language of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo of New Mexico. (The pueblo was previously known as San Juan Pueblo; it was returned to its pre-Spanish name two years ago.)

“Through the years, the Tewa language has been maintained and transmitted orally,” says Jacobs. “A written language was developed in the late 1960s, along with a dictionary, but it has been incomplete.”

Jacobs’ original goal was to collect and preserve traditional Tewa stories. But she and colleagues at Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo worried that few people would understand the stories in the future. The language, abandoned by many citizens, was slowly disappearing. The current project grew out of this concern.

“This is a world crisis,” says Jacobs. “Indigenous languages are being lost at an alarming rate.”

Jacobs joined the UW Women Studies faculty in 1974, serving as director from 1974 to 1982, acting director from 1987 to 1988, and director of the undergraduate program from 1997 to 2004. She is currently co-director of the Northern Pueblos Institute in the American Indian Center at Northern New Mexico College.

 

Porter Recognized by Chinese Academy of Sciences

Stephen Porter has been traveling to China for nearly 25 years, conducting research on climate change in remote areas of the country. But his last visit was to Beijing, where he received an award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s foremost scientific organization.

	Stephen Porter stands near a watchtower along the Great Wall near the margin of the Mu Us Desert in central China.

Porter, UW professor of earth and space sciences and former director of the Quaternary Research Center, has been elected a CAS Einstein Professor. An aim of professorship appointments is to help develop future academic leaders through the interaction of Chinese graduate students and top international scholars.

Porter first visited China in 1983 as a member of a small American scientific delegation. Since 1985 he and Chinese colleagues have carried out field studies across the loess region of central China, from Inner Mongolia to the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, where they have been assessing the monsoon climate over the last 2.5 million years.

“The research involves reconstructing changing summer environments, one of the primary paleoclimatic signals in eastern Asia,” says Porter. The primary geologic evidence, he explains, pertains to the effects of changing precipitation over time. During glacial ages, wind-blown dust is deposited; during non-glacial times the dust deposition rate decreases and soils develop. Analyzing these sediments, which collectively range from 100 to 400 meters thick, the researchers are able to identify alternating summer and winter monsoon conditions.

Chinese graduate students commonly join Porter as field assistants. Many have later taken academic positions at Chinese and American universities. In the course of their studies, the research team has visited remote villages that have witnessed many changes over the past 24 years, including the introduction of satellite dishes, television, cell phones, and solar energy panels.

“In some areas where we worked, I was apparently the first Westerner that had been there,” says Porter.

The Chinese Academy of Science established the Einstein Professorship in 2005 and elects 10 to12 leading foreign scientists each year. Porter is the first earth scientist to be honored in this way.

“This is the top honor that the Academy awards to foreign scientists, I was told,” says Porter. “It means a great deal to me, for my name was proposed and promoted by a number of my Chinese colleagues in the CAS.”

 

Other Awards, Honors, and Professorships

Randy Beam, associate professor of communication, won the national award for best research on journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists as co-author of the book The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium.

Marshall Brown, professor of comparative literature, was selected as the A&S Alumni Distinguished Term Professor for 2007-2008.

Daniel Chiu, professor of chemistry, won the Fresenius Award of the Phi Lambda Upsilon National Honor Society for his pioneering studies in the area of neurochemistry.

Ioana Dumitriu, assistant professor of mathematics, won the Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis, administered by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

Munira Khalil, assistant professor of chemistry, was one of ten faculty nationwide selected for a Dreyfus New Faculty Award for her outstanding record and promise.

Richard Kielbowicz, associate professor of communication, received the 23rd annual Covert Award in Mass Communication History from the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The award recognized Kielbowicz’s article, “The Law and Mob Law in Attacks on Antislavery Newspapers, 1833-1860,” published in Law and History Review, as the best mass communication history or article published the previous year.

Terje Leiren, professor and chair of the Department of Scandinavian Studies, has been named Sverre Arestad Endowed Professor in Norwegian Studies, a five-year appointment.

Alan Marlatt, professor of psychology, received the Harriet Tubman Freedom Award for Outstanding Community Activism and Lifetime Achievement to Improve Health at the second annual Health Disparities Conference at Columbia University.

Heather McHugh, professor of English, won a “genius” award from the Stranger newspaper.

Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and sociology and director of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Irwin Sarason, professor emeritus of psychology, received the Western Psychological Association’s 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology, has been appointed the Clarence and Elissa Schrag Faculty Fellow in Sociology.

Dam Thanh Son, senior fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Theory, was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Terry Swanson, senior lecturer of earth and space sciences, received the 2007 UW Interfraternal Council Excellence in Teaching Award and the 2007 UW Panhellenic Association Excellence in Teaching Award.

Cody Walker, acting instructor of English, won the Seattle Arts and Lectures “Poet Populist” award for 2007-08. Walker received his PhD from the UW.

Return to Table of Contents, Autumn 2007