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Northwestern University

Faculty Honors and Awards

2016-2017 Academic Year

Summer Quarter

Ezra Getzler, professor of mathematics, has won a 2017 Simons fellowship from the Simons Foundation.

Tobin Marks, a professor of chemistry, has won a Guggenheim fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Kenneth Poppelmeier, a professor of chemistry, has been named an honorary member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Northwestern University President and professor of economics Morton Schapiro has been elected to the National Academy of Education.

Richard Van Duyne, the Charles E. and Emma Morrison Professor of Chemistry, has received the Spiers Memorial Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Michael Wasielewski, the Clare Hamilton Hall Professor of Chemistry and executive director of the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN), has received the Physical Organic Chemistry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Barbara Newman, the John Evans Professor of Latin and a professor of English, religious studies and classics, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. 

Assistant professor of economics Mar Reguant has been awarded the Banco Sabadell Foundation Prize for Economic Research. The prize recognizes an outstanding Spanish researcher in economics, business and social knowledge who is under the age of 40.

Chad A. Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, has been named a 2017 American Chemical Society Fellow. He is being recognized for “his pioneering contributions to nanochemistry and the materials and devices that have resulted from them, which have improved lives and dramatically increased scientific understanding and capabilities,” according to the ACS.

Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart has been named one of 38 “Great Immigrants” for 2017 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which celebrates contributions of naturalized U.S. citizens annually on July 4.

Will Dichtel, the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry, has received the 2017 Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award from the North Jersey Section of the American Chemical Society. The award recognizes the accomplishments in pure or applied chemistry of an American chemist under the age of 40. Dichtel was also named a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. The 30 finalists are considered to be some of America’s most important young scientific researchers aged 42 years or younger, driving the next generation of innovation by addressing today’s most complex and intriguing scientific questions. 

Assistant professor of mathematics Antonio Auffinger has been awarded a Gold Prize by the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians. His paper, "The Parisi measure has a unique minimizer," settled a longstanding open question in probability.

Chad A. Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded a $5 million grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to develop a novel design method called “nanocombinatorics.”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Robert Braun received a number of honors from the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. They include the following:

Braun also received the following awards from the American Political Science Association:

Spring Quarter

Associate professor of English and gender and sexuality studies Nick Davis has won the 2017 Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor Award. 

Senior lecturer of anthropology Erin Waxenbaum has won the 2017 Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Lecturer Award.

Professor of instruction Francesca Tataranni has won the 2017 Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished University Professor of Instruction Award. 

Professor of molecular biosciences Amy Rosenzweig and professor of sociology John Hagan have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Political science professor and associate dean for faculty affairs Edward Gibson has received the 2017 Medal of Merit from the National University of Veracruz in Mexico for his research on authoritarianism and democracy.  

Associate professor of art history Huey Copeland has been awarded a 2017 Absolut Art Writing Award. 

Daniel Immerwahr, assistant professor of history, is one of 35 recipients of a 2017 Andrew Carnegie fellowship. 

Ana C. Thomé Williams, an associate professor of instruction in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, in May accepted the 2017 AOTP/Brazilian Press Award for Best Educational Initiative/Project in Portuguese in the United States from the American Organization of Portuguese Teachers. 

Professor of chemistry and molecular biosciences Richard Silverman has received the American Chemical Society’s Award for Creative Invention. Silverman’s work led to the creation of the drug Lyrica, prescribed for fibromyalgia, epilepsy and other conditions. 

Charles Manski, the Board of Trustees Professor of Economics, has been elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. The Distinguished Fellow awards recognize the lifetime research contributions of distinguished economists. 

Vicky Kalogera, the E. O. Haven Professor of Physics & Astronomy, has been named the 16th recipient of Northwestern University's Martin E. and Gertrude G. Walder Award for Research Excellence. The award is given annually to a faculty member in any school or discipline within the University in recognition of excellence in research. 

Associate professor of molecular biosciences Heather Pinkett has received the Individual Biomedical Research Award from the Hartwell Foundation. The award funds early stage, innovative biomedical research to benefit children. 

Nanoscientists Teri W. Odom and Richard P. Van Duyne have been named Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows by the U.S. Department of Defense. They will each receive $3 million to conduct high-risk, high-payoff research. 

Professor of chemistry Tobin Marks is the recipient of the 2017 Priestley Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Chemical Society. 

Professor of chemistry and Department of Chemistry chairman Peter Stair is the 2017 recipient of the Herman Pines Award. He is the third Northwestern faculty member to receive the award, which honors exceptional research in catalysis.

Professor of anthropology Shalini Shankar has earned a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship. Shankar will research Generation Z, exploring how this demographic category can be defined in ways that more centrally account for the contributions of immigrants and minorities.

Economics professors Martin Eichenbaum and Larry Christiano have been awarded a 2016 Best Paper Prize for their American Economic Journal article "Understanding the Great Recession."

Ken Poeppelmeier, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science, has been named to the Spanish Royal Academy of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Assistant professor of physics and astronomy Claude-André Faucher-Giguère has received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. He will receive $794,304 over five years from the NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences to create the next generation of galaxy formation simulations.

Wendy Griswold, the Bergen Evans Professor of Humanities and a professor of sociology, has been appointed a National Humanities Center Fellow for 2017-18. Her project is "Placements: Position and Location Through American Culture."

Professor of chemistry Franz Geiger has been awarded the 2017 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his outstanding research record on environmental interfaces and nonlinear spectroscopy.

Jennifer Cole, a professor of linguistics, has been named a Distinguished Lecturer of the International Speech Communication Association. She will be giving a series of general audience lectures at conferences and summer schools. 

Professor of anthropology John Hudson has been honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Association for American Geographers’ Rural Geography Specialty Group. 

Associate professor of anthropology Rebecca Seligman has been awarded a $102,0000 research grant from the Grant Foundation to study “Cultures of Care: Exploring Inequalities in Mental Health Services Among Mexican American Youth.” 

Promotions 

The following associate professors have been approved by the provost and president for promotion to the rank of professor effective Sept. 1, 2017, after approval by the Board of Trustees: 

The following assistant professors have been approved by the provost and president for promotion to the rank of associate professor with tenure, effective Sept. 1, 2017 after approval by the Board of Trustees: 
  
 

W Award Winners

Seventeen Weinberg College faculty members have been named winners of the 2017 W Awards. They are:

Weinberg College Teaching Awards

The following Weinberg College faculty members have been honored with 2017 teaching awards. 

E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching 

Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Awards (for tenure-line faculty)



Arts and Sciences Alumni Teaching Awards (for teaching-track faculty)


Weinberg College Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research

Weinberg College Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Awards 

 2017-18 Kaplan Institute Fellowships

 Kaplan Institute Fellowships for the 2017-18 academic year have been awarded to the following faculty members and their projects: 

Winter Quarter

Omar Farha, a professor of chemistry, has won the 2017 Pittcon Separation Science Award for his work on gas storage.

Kenneth R. Poppelmeier, a professor of chemistry, has been elected a foreign member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences. Poppelmeier will travel to Madrid to speak before the Academy in May 2017.

Bill Halperin and Jim Sauls, both professors of physics, have been awarded the Fritz London Memorial Prize for 2017. They share this prize with another researcher, Jeevak Parpia of Cornell University. The London Prize recognizes major contributions to the field of low-temperature physics. Over the years, 12 of the award’s 22 recipients have also received Nobel Prizes. Halperin and Sauls have been recognized for their pioneering work on the influence of disorder on the superfluidity of helium-3 (an isotope of helium that exhibits unique properties at very low temperatures).  

Anthropology professor Mary Weismantel has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship for her project “An Archaeology of Sex: The Moche Sex Pots.”

E. Patrick Johnson, a professor of African American studies and performance studies, is one of the inaugural recipients of the Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity.

Mathematicians Gang Liu and Yifeng Liu and neurobiologist Tiffany Schmidt have each been awarded a prestigious 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. They are among 126 outstanding early-career scholars being recognized for their achievements and potential to contribute substantially to their scientific fields.

Physicist Eric Dahl and chemists Danna Freedman and T. David Harris and have been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), as announced by President Barack Obama. The PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Mathematics professor Valentino Tosatti has won an appointment next year to the Poincare Chair at the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris, France.

Chad Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, has won the 2016 Dickson Prize in Science.

Thomas J. Meade, a professor of chemistry, has been named a 2017 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Election to NAI Fellow status is a high professional distinction accorded 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.

Four faculty of the College have been honored with National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships — a record-setting number for Northwestern in recent history. The recipients are:

Jeffrey Masten, a professor of English and gender and sexuality studies, who received a fellowship to continue his research on Christopher Marlowe for a scholarly edition of Marlowe’s “Edward II.”  

Loubna El Amine, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, who will continue research for a new book, tentatively titled “The Foundations of Confucian Political Thought: History, Law, and the Political Community,” which will endeavor to delineate the early Confucian conception of the political community. 

Haydon Cherry, an assistant professor in the Department of History, who will continue work on an intellectual biography of Dao Duy Anh (1904-1988), arguably the most important Vietnamese scholar and intellectual of the 20th century.

Rachel Zuckert, who teaches philosophy of art and German philosophy, will write a book on the aesthetic theory of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a canonical figure in the German literary and philosophical traditions

Wendy Pearlman, associate professor of political science and core faculty member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program, was commended by the Syrian Studies Association, winning the 2016 prize for Outstanding Article on Syria for her article “Narratives of Fear in Syria” (published in the journal Perspectives on Politics, Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2016). 

Fall Quarter

Professor Laura DeMarco has been named the winner of the American Mathematical Society’s 2017 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics. DeMarco is honored "for her fundamental contributions to complex dynamics, potential theory, and the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics."

Bryna Kra, the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics and Michael R. Wasielewski, the Clare Hamilton Hall Professor of Chemistry have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nanoscientist Chad A. Mirkin has been awarded the 2016 RUSNANOPRIZE for his invention of spherical nucleic acids. The RUSNANOPRIZE is awarded to “scientists and researchers being authors of scientific and/or technological discovery in the field of nanotechnology.”

The American Chemical Society has awarded Professor Richard Silverman the 2017 Award for Creative Invention. Silverman pioneered the drug Lyrica, which is used for treating fibromyalgia, epilepsy and other conditions.

Professor Adilson Motter has been awarded a Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award. Motter will work with systems biologist Kimberly Reynolds at the University of Texas-Southwestern to determine if the order in which genes are “knocked out” (deleted) from an organism has any influence on its resulting condition.

Assistant professor Katherine Amato has been named a member of the new Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Global Scholars Program. Membership recognizes exceptional early-career investigators and provides $100,000 in research support as well as specialized leadership development programs.

Mercouri Kanatzidis, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry, has been named the co-winner of the Eric and Sheila Samson Prize for his innovative scientific contributions to alternative fuel development. The prize is the world’s largest monetary honor in the field of alternative fuels. Kanatzidis will split the $1 million award with co-winner Gregory Stephanopoulos from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sir Fraser Stoddart, the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry, has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Stoddart shares the award with Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France and Bernard L. Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. 

Seth Stein, the William Deering Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, has been elected president of the American Geophysical Union's Natural Hazards Focus group.

Psychology professor William Revelle (along with his wife, Eleanor) has been honored by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for their advocacy work on the subject of climate change.

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

Professors Elad Harel and Nathaniel Stern have been selected to receive the prestigious 2016 Young Investigator Awards from the Office of Naval Research. They are two of 47 scientists from across the nation honored this year by the ONR for their exceptionally creative research.

Professor Catherine Woolley and Assistant Professor Tiffany Schmidt are both recipients of the NIH Common Fund's 2016 High-Risk, High-Reward Research Awards.  The program, supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund, awarded a total of 88 grants to scientists with bold approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.  Professors Woolley and Schmidt were awarded the Transformative Research Award and New Innovator Award, respectively.

Professor Aldon Morris has been named a co-winner of the Association for Humanist Sociology’s 2016 Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for his book, The Scholar Denied. Earlier this year, the PROSE Awards bestowed the prestigious R.R. Hawkins Award on Morris for the book as well.

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