University Times

Shirley Richards, administrative assistant in the Owen Library on the Johnstown campus, has been named recipient of the first UPJ President's Award for Excellence in Service.

UPJ President Albert Etheridge announced the winner at last month's staff holiday luncheon. The award was established by Etheridge to "recognize individuals who not only take the role they play in everyday activities of the college with seriousness and responsibility, but who also accept the challenge of responsible citizenship — individuals who serve the campus in ways that are not in their job description and who serve the greater community with enthusiasm and cheerfulness."

The award includes a $1,000 stipend.

Richards joined the UPJ staff in 1981. She has been active in the Staff Activities and Concerns Association since its inception. She maintains the group's archives, and volunteers in numerous community service projects, including Project Bundle-Up, staff volunteer night at the Pasquerilla Performing Arts Center, Project Snowflake, freshman convocation and commencement. She is the group's historian and was key in the development of several staff initiatives, including the employee-student partnership, freshman move-in day and the new SAC Association scholarship.

Richards currently is a member of the UPJ Women's Association and the Ladies Auxiliary Unit 551, St. Michael American Legion.

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Anthony Grace, neuroscience, was one of two winners of the 1999 Daniel H. Efron Award for his research. The award, presented by the American College of Neuropsycho-pharmacology, recognizes an individual under the age of 45 for outstanding basic research contributions to neuropsycho-pharmacology. Selection is based on both the quality of the researcher's contribution and its impact in advancing neuropsy-chopharmacology.

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Pitt has named Bob Shooer, who had been general manager of Saks Fifth Avenue for four years and had been with the Pittsburgh store since 1997, director of athletic ticket marketing.

Shooer will oversee Pitt's athletic ticket office as well as the new football stadium sales center located Downtown.

Prior to joining Saks, Shooer held management positions with Macy's, Woodward & Lothrop and The Bon-Ton department store.

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Fredric Price, UPMC-affiliated physician, has been elected national chair of a committee studying the treatment of cervical cancer for the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists.

The committee will focus on developing guidelines for the treatment of gynecologic malignancies.

Price has devoted his practice to the care of women with cancer of the cervix, ovaries or uterus. He is on the staff of UPMC South Side, Magee-Womens and several other UPMC hospitals.

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Marwan A. Simaan, Bell of Pennsylvania/Bell Atlantic Professor of electrical engineering, and graduate student Nicholas Samaras received an IEEE Society on Industry Applications award for their paper "Water-Cooled End-Point Boundary Temperature Control of Hot Strip via Dynamic Programming." The paper was published in the society's Transactions.

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An experimental computer animation created by studio arts chairperson Paul Glabicki has been selected for inclusion in Arts in Motion, a new international festival of time-based media. Glabicki's 61-minute piece, "Red Fence," is one of 30 selected from a field of over 150 works.

Arts in Motion opens this month at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and is sponsored by USC's School of Fine Arts and Annenberg School for Communication. The selected works are finalists for the Intelefilm Award for Creative Excellence.

Two University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) administrators will manage operations for the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI).

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Barbara Duffy Stewart, UPCI director of communications and public affairs, has been named executive director. UPCI director Ronald Herberman will serve as president of the association for the next two years.

AACI selected UPCI to manage its operations in response to a proposal submitted by Stewart. AACI is dedicated to fostering multidisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations for the control of cancer through research, treatment, education and service programs. It accomplishes this through the large network of cancer institutes across the country.

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Arlene Taylor, associate professor in the department of library and information science, has won a Profile in Excellence Award from her alma mater, Oklahoma Baptist University.

Taylor has published six books on library science and has a seventh due out next month.

Before joining the Pitt faculty, Taylor worked in a variety of other library science positions, including cataloguer for the Library of Congress, college librarian and expert in cataloguing information. In addition, she taught at the University of Illinois, Iowa, University of North Carolina and Columbia.

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Marcell A. Mallette has been named director of alumni relations and annual giving at the Bradford campus.

Mallette had been serving as director of alumni relations, where she increased alumni gifts by 32 percent and instituted several initiatives, including a student career program and an on-line alumni career contact network.

In her new position, she also will be responsible for all annual giving, including community, faculty, staff and parents.

Two professors of otolaryngology at the School of Medicine have received special recognition for their outstanding clinical and research expertise.

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Eugene N. Myers, chairperson of the medical school's Department of Otolaryngology, has been awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (Scotland).

The college was established in 1505. Among the other honorary fellows are Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela.

Myers's research and clinical efforts have focused on the treatment of head and neck cancers.

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Joseph M. Furman, director of the Balance Disorders Program in the department of otolaryngology in the UPMC Health System, has been re-appointed as chair of the NASA Peer Review Panel for Neuroscience. The panel reviews proposals submitted to the NASA Life Sciences Division regarding neuroscience issues for both ground-based research and flight-based research.

Furman, who is also a professor of neurology, specializes in managing patients with dizziness and disequilibrium.