Skip to main content
Northwestern University

Faculty Honors and Awards

2015-2016 Academic Year

Spring Quarter

Nathalie Bouzaglo, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, received the 2016 Fernando Coronil Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association for her book Ficción adulterada: pasiones ilícitas del entresiglo venezolano.

Alejandra Uslenghi, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, received an honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association, Section Cono Sur for her book Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibitions: Modern Cultures of Visuality.

Laura Leon Llerena, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese, won two prestigious awards for her project “Restoring the Illegible: Unexpected Indigenous Uses of Writing in Early Colonial Peru.” She will spend the 2016 fall quarter as a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, and the 2017 winter and spring quarters at the Dahlem Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universitat in Berlin with the support of an Andrew Mellon Foundation-Volkswagen Stiftung research fellowship.

Tobin J. Marks, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Chemistry, will receive the 2017 Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society in recognition of his landmark research and dedicated service to the chemistry enterprise. It is the highest honor bestowed by the world’s largest scientific society. In addition, Marks recently received two other international honors: the President’s International Award for Distinguished Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich. Marks is a world leader in the fields of organometallic chemistry, chemical catalysis, materials science, organic electronics, photovoltaics, nanotechnology and sustainability. 

The Royal Society of Chemistry has recognized Samuel I. Stupp, the Board of Trustees Professor and director of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology, with the Soft Matter and Biophysical Chemistry Award. The award honors outstanding and innovative research in soft condensed matter and the application of physico-chemical techniques to biological problems. Stupp has also been invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Franz Geiger, professor of chemistry, has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. 

Sarah Maza, the Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences and professor of history, has been named the 11th recipient of the Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship Award.

Adrian Randolph, dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of art history, has won first prize in the 2016 American Association of Italian Studies' Book Award competition in the Renaissance, 18th and 19th century category. Randolph was recognized for his book, Touching Objects (Yale University Press, 2015).

The Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki has announced that it will confer upon Christine Helmer, professor of religious studies, the degree of Doctor of Theology honoris causa in June 2017.

Bryna Kra, the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics, and Michael R. Wasielewski, the Clare Hamilton Hall Professor of Chemistry and executive director of Northwestern’s Institute for Sustainability and Energy, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Wendy Wall, the Avalon Professor of the Humanities, has won the 2016 Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence award. The award honors Wall’s outstanding performance and dedication to undergraduate education at Northwestern University.

The following Weinberg College faculty members are inaugural winners of the W Awards, which will provide seed funding for exploratory research:

Professor Chad Mirkin will receive the 2017 William H. Nichols Medal based on his outstanding achievements in the chemical sciences, especially his landmark contributions in nanotechnology. The Nichols Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards of the American Chemical Society and the New York Section of the ACS.

Karl Scheidt, a professor of chemistry, has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. 

Bruce G. Carruthers, professor of sociology, is serving as the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

The British Academy has elected Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor, a corresponding fellow for 2016.

Marco Gallio, an assistant professor of neurobiology, has been named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Associate Professor Daniel Galvin has won the American Political Science Association's Best Paper in Public Policy Award for his paper "Deterring Wage Theft: Alt-Labor, State Politics, and the Policy Determinants of Minimum Wage Compliance."

Assistant Professor Dan Krcmaric has won the American Political Science Association's Kenneth Waltz Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in the field of international security submitted in 2015. The dissertation is entitled: “The Justice Dilemma: International Criminal Accountability, Mass Atrocities, and Civil Conflict."

Michael Rodriguez, an incoming assistant professor of sociology and Latino/Latina Studies, has won the 2016 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association.

Kristian Hahn, an assistant professor of physics, is one of 49 young scientists from across the country to receive 2016 Early Career Research Program funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. 

Mark Hauser, an associate professor of anthropology, has been named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Noelle Sullivan, an assistant professor of instruction in the Global Health Studies Program, has received an Alumnae of Northwestern University Grant. She will use the grant to bring the Canadian aboriginal artist Sonny Assu to campus to do a public talk, offer studio sit-in sessions with two undergraduate art classes, and present a guest lecture in an undergraduate indigenous studies course on campus during the spring quarter of 2017.

Katherine Amato, an assistant professor of anthropology, has won an appointment to the Humans & the Microbiome program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a group of more than 1,000 scientists and engineers from universities around the world, recently received two significant honors: the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize, recognizing extraordinary scientific achievement, and the 2016 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize, recognizing a discovery leading to fundamental advances in understanding the universe. A number of Northwestern University researchers, including Vicky Kalogera, the Erastus O. Haven Professor of Physics and Astronomy and director of Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, are co-authors of this year’s gravitational-wave discovery paper and therefore awardees for both prizes.

The Weinberg College Committee on Teaching Awards has recognized the following faculty for outstanding teaching:

The E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching

The Distinguished Teaching Award


The Arts and Sciences Alumni Teaching Award


The Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research:


Winter Quarter

The Chemical Heritage Foundation has named Professor Chad Mirkin the recipient of the 2016 American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal.

Igal Hendel, the Ida C. Cook Professor and chair of the Department of Economics, has received the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society for his paper, "Equilibria in Health Exchanges: Adverse Selection versus Reclassification Risk.” The award is bestowed every two years for an applied article published in the journal Econometrica.

Assistant Professor of Neurobiology Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy has been named a 2016 Searle Scholar. The award, $300,000 over three years, is one of the most prestigious early career awards for biomedical scientists.

Professor of Chemistry Karl Scheidt has been named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Richard Kraut, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, has been named a 2016 fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The Organization of American Historians has bestowed the 2016 Merle Curti Award on Assistant Professor of History Daniel Immerwahr. The award is given annually for the best books published in American intellectual history and American social history. Immerwahr is the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press).

Bryna Kra, the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She works in ergodic theory and dynamical systems, particularly on problems motivated by combinatorics and number theory.

The following faculty members have been named 2016-17 Fellows at the Kaplan Fellows for the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities:

Professors Joseph T. Hupp and Teri W. Odom — both Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Weinberg College — have been named fellows by the Materials Research Society. The highly selective fellowship recognizes individuals for their significant contributions to materials research. 

Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History Dyan Elliot has been awarded the ACLS Fellowship for her project on “Sexual Scandal and the Medieval Clergy.” Her project examines the impact of the church’s scandal-averse policies on medieval clerical culture through the lenses of gender and sexuality.

Professor of Anthropology and Gender and Sexuality Studies Mary Weismantel has received an Alumnae of Northwestern University Award for Curriculum Development. She will spend the summer developing a new undergraduate course that will explore art and architecture through the context of Native American educational and cultural traditions, environmental sustainability and issues of diversity, inequality and politics.

Assistant Professor of History Paul Ramirez won two prestigious awards for his new project “Salt of God: A Religious History of Mexico.” He will spend the fall of 2016 at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advance Study and the spring of 2017 at the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies.

Assistant Professor of History Keith Woodhouse has been awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Huntington Library, one of the preeminent residential fellowships in the Humanities. He will spend the 2016-2017 academic year at the Huntington doing research for his second book, which analyzes environmental impact statements in order to understand the shifting meaning of “environmentalism” in American life.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Elad Harel will receive a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. He has also been selected to receive the prestigious 2016 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Nathaniel Stern has been selected to receive the 2016 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.

Omar Farha, research professor in chemistry, has been named the Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry. Farha will deliver a lecture at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in August. 

Chad Mirkin, professor of chemistry, has received the prestigious International Dan David Prize for his groundbreaking research coupling human DNA and nanotechnology. His work has led to the invention of 3-D structures called spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), which hold promise for the development of new health therapies.

Three Weinberg College professors — T. David Harris, Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy and Mar Reguant — have each received a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship for 2016 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

Aldon Morris, the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and a professor of African American studies, was awarded the 2016 Prose R.R. Hawkins Award for his book “The Scholar Denied.”

Professors of Chemistry Chad Mirkin, Samuel Stupp and Richard Van Duyne have all been inducted into The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s (AIMBE) College of Fellows.

Associate Professor of History Ji-Yeon Yuh has received a grant from Humanities Without Walls Global Midwest.  She will be working with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a project to collect oral histories from Asian Americans in the Midwest, and with a playwright to create a dramatization of their stories.

Assistant Professor of History David Shyovitz has won the 2016 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize of the Medieval Academy of America, granted to the author of the best first article in medieval studies. The winning article is “Christian and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Werewolf Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 75 (2014):521-43.  

Associate Professor of History Ipek Yosmaoglu has won a Lise Meitner Fellowship. She will spend 2016-17 on academic leave at the University of Graz in Austria.

Fall Quarter

Krista Thompson, the Board of Visitors Professor in the Department of Art History, has been awarded the 2016 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award by the College Art Association for her book Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press).

Tobin J. Marks, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Chemistry, and Antonio F. Facchetti, an adjunct professor of chemistry, have been named 2015 Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors.

Associate professor of political science Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has won a three-year, $390,000 grant from the Luce Foundation to explore the relationship between U.S. domestic and foreign policy and religion and religious governance.

The Russell Sage Foundation has selected Mesmin Destin, an assistant professor of psychology, to be a visiting scholar for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Two Weinberg College faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Thomas McDade, the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Anthropology, was chosen for his contributions to the field of biological anthropology. Adilson Motter, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics and Astronomy, was selected for his contributions to the fields of complex systems and nonlinear dynamics.

Vicky Kalogera, the Erastus O. Haven Professor in physics and astronomy, has been awarded the 2016 Hans A. Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society

Judith N. Levi, an associate professor emerita of linguistics, has received the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Levi was honored for her "exceptional achievements in promoting reconciliation between the German and Jewish peoples."

Wesley G. Skogan, a professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, has received the 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award in Evidence-Based Crime Policy from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. This award is the center's highest honor and recognizes individuals who have made a significant contribution and commitment to advance the integration of science with criminal justice practice.

Tracy C. Davis, the Barber Professor of Performing Arts and a professor of English and theatre, has won the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award honors researchers whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Laurie Shannon, the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English Literature, has received the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award for her book, “The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales.” The Dietz Prize honors the year’s most outstanding contribution to English Renaissance studies. 

Yarrow Axford, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, and Danna Freedman, an assistant professor of chemistry, have received prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Awards from the National Science Foundation. Axford will receive nearly $600,000 over five years to reconstruct the climate history of southern Greenland. Freedman will receive $600,000 over five years to advance her work on quantum computing.

Mercouri Kanatzidis, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded the American Physical Society's 2016 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials. The award, which comes with a $10,000 prize, recognizes outstanding achievement in the science and application of new materials.

James Sauls, a professor of physics and astronomy, has been named a distinguished visiting scholar at the Institute for Materials Science at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history, has been awarded the 2015 International Balzan Prize for his groundbreaking work on the economic history of Europe and roots of technological change.

Chad A. Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded the inaugural $400,000 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research from the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor of Chemistry Franz Geiger and his team have received a five-year, nearly $20 million renewable grant from the National Science Foundation to study nanoparticles in emerging technologies and their effects on the environment.

Back to top