Tomorrow is our final faculty meeting, an occasion on which we will recognize the winners of College of Arts & Sciences teaching awards, advising awards, and the new Susan Jackson Award. In anticipation of our CAS awards, I want to reflect on our outstanding faculty who have received University, national, and international recognition this year. Nominating our faculty colleagues for awards and then celebrating those awards when they are received help increase awareness of our colleagues’ work and contribute to a vibrant, collegial intellectual environment, as highlighted in our CAS strategic vision.
Awards internal to Boston University are important for recognizing exceptional work by our colleagues, and may also lead to external recognition and awards that reflect well on our institution. In recent years, alumni donors have provided funding to make awards to outstanding beginning assistant professors. Two career development professorships awarded in fall 2017 went to CAS assistant professors. Xi Ling, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science & Engineering, was awarded a University Provost Career Development Professorship for her multidisciplinary research in nanoscience. Emily Whiting, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, was awarded the Innovation Career Development Professorship for her research in architectural geometry, computer-aided design, and 3D fabrication.
Other impressive University awards have been made to distinguished CAS faculty this year for their teaching and advising. The 2018 Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award went to Robert Margo, Professor of Economics, whose work examines the evolution of racial economic inequality from the Civil War to the present. At BU, he has developed the economic history option for PhD students and pioneered the teaching of economic history and race. Dr. Shoai Hattori, a full-time lecturer in neuroscience, received one of BU’s university-wide Academic Advising Awards. The just-announced Metcalf winners include Brooke Blower, Associate Professor of History, who will be awarded the Metcalf Cup and Prize at Commencement, and Elizabeth Co, Senior Lecturer in Biology, who will receive the Metcalf Prize. We celebrate all of these recipients of University awards.
Several of our faculty have received major national and international scholarly achievement honors and awards this past year. Here are the highlights. Michael Hasselmo, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience, was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This honor recognizes his many career achievements in neuroscience using a range of experimental methods to understand the cortical mechanism for memory-guided behavior. David Bishop, Professor of Physics and of Biomedical, Mechanical, and Electrical and Computer Engineering and Head of the Division of Material Science and Engineering, was elected as a 2017 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. The society recognized him for his “highly 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.” Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, was named a Guggenheim Fellow for her project examining the “rhetoric of discontent” through a transatlantic investigation of the populist revolt against globalization and Europeanization. Physics professor Larry Sulak won the Panofsky Prize, the top prize in experimental particle physics, for his paradigm-shifting work detecting nucleon decay and neutrino oscillation. Professor Ran Canetti, of the Computer Science department, was awarded the 2018 RSA Conference Award for his pioneering work in cryptography. Professor Bruce Shulman was invited to serve as the Harmsworth Professor at the University of Oxford for the 2020-2021 year, a top lifetime achievement award in the field of American History. Professor Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment was selected by the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation for a Research Award, in recognition of his achievements to date and the expectation that he will continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. Finally, Neta Crawford, Professor of Political Science, received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association’s International Ethics Section in recognition of her many and vital scholarly contributions through the years to the study of ethics/international relations.
Our faculty have also won impressive prizes for recent work. Professor of Classical Studies Herbert Golder has won three awards at international film festivals for a film he wrote, directed, and produced, “Ballad of a Righteous Merchant, Notes on Werner Herzog Directing” (Best Feature Documentary and Best Director of a Feature Documentary at the Milan International Filmmakers Festival (2017) and Best Story at the London International Film Festival (2018)). Fallou Ngom, Professor of Anthropology and director of the African Studies Center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, was awarded the prestigious Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the most important scholarly work in African Studies for his book Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya (Oxford University Press, 2016).
In addition to such career achievement honors, awards, and prizes, there are several forms of national recognition that our newest faculty have received for exceptionally promising research careers. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation named three CAS assistant professors 2018 Sloan Research Fellows: astronomer Wen Li, physicist Anushya Chandran, and mathematician Jennifer Balakrishnan. Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Science Steve Ramirez was selected as an Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. And Assistant Professor of Earth and Environment Jeffrey Geddes has received an Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation to investigate how interannual variability in the sources and sinks of reactive trace gases from forests influences air quality across North America.
This is not even to mention the many research grants, foundation awards, and invitations to give lectures that our faculty have received, which testify to their scholarly activity and impact. Together these individual awards give evidence of a thriving intellectual community, in which faculty and students together create new knowledge and appreciate each others’ achievements. When any of our faculty are recognized, there are always many others who have helped make that possible, including their faculty mentors and colleagues, their graduate students, support staff, and those who nominate faculty for the recognition they deserve. Celebrating these awards is all about increasing awareness—among ourselves and among others—of our colleagues’ work and encouraging a vibrant, collegial intellectual environment. Please join me in congratulating our colleagues.