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Northwestern University

Faculty Honors & Awards: 2016-2017

Fall 2016

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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