Accolades

Gerald D. Holder, U.S. Steel Dean of Engineering and Distinguished Service Professor of Engineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, will be honored by the Pennsylvania Society of Professional Engineers—Pittsburgh Chapter with its Distinguished Service Award.

Holder will be recognized at an event in February for his contributions to the engineering profession and his legacy in engineering education. He came to the University in 1979 and served as chair of chemical engineering from 1987-95 and became dean of engineering in 1996.

“The University of Pittsburgh’s engineering program is one of the oldest in the U.S., and Dean Holder has helped to establish its national and international reputation for excellence,” said Scott Sukits, president of the society's Pittsburgh chapter. 

H. Richard Milner IV has been recognized within Education Week’s 2018 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings.

Milner is ranked 70th in the national list, which identifies the nation’s top 200 university-based scholars who are doing the most to shape educational practice and policy. Milner is the sole Pitt faculty member listed, and he is the only scholar named from an educational institution in Western Pennsylvania.

At Pitt, Milner conducts in-depth research on the impact race and poverty plays on educational access. He is considered a national authority on the barriers to educational opportunities for traditionally underrepresented communities.

A Pitt faculty member since 2013, Milner is the Helen Faison Endowed Chair of Urban Education and the director of the Center for Urban Education, both within the University’s School of Education. Additionally, Milner also holds secondary appointments in Pitt’s School of Social Work, as well as the departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. 

Two University of Pittsburgh faculty members from the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences were recognized with awards from the Pennsylvania Physical Therapy Association.

Physical therapy assistant professor David Wert received the association’s Neurological Special Interest Group’s Award of Excellence. The award honors a member of the physical therapy association who has made a lasting contribution to the state of Pennsylvania in the field of neurology.

Vice dean and physical therapy associate professor Debora Miller received the Carlin-Michels Achievement Award, which recognizes her numerous contributions and accomplishments as a clinician and educator.

Thomas Akiva, an assistant professor in the School of Education, has been awarded a grant of nearly $300,000 from the National Science Foundation. The funding supports his efforts to study and enhance makerspaces — specifically, areas for children to create, build and explore with various tools and materials — within Pittsburgh-area libraries. Through the project, Akiva hopes to develop new ways support adults who work with youth in program settings.

A faculty member at Pitt since 2012, Akiva focuses his research on understanding and improving out-of-school learning programs by examining instructor practices, staff professional development and cross-program networks.

The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Charles E. Kaufman Foundation has named Tia-Lynn Ashman and James Pipas as recipients of one of its New Initiatives grants for their project “Pollen as the next viral frontier: Unrecognized threat to food security and native biodiversity.” Ashman is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolution, and Pipas is the Herbert W. and Grace Boyer Chair in Molecular Biology; both are faculty members in Pitt’s Department of Biological Sciences. With their $300,000 grant payable over two years, Ashman and Pipas will unearth how pollen can transmit viruses between plants. Their research could have implications for the nation's food supply.

Michael Hatridge and Roger Mong’s proposed research on “Protecting quantum wires for quantum computing” was also recognized with a $300,000 New Initiatives grant, from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. Hatridge and Mong are assistant professors of condensed matter physics in Pitt’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. Hatridge and Mong hope that their research will help to make a real quantum computer feasible; a quantum computer would process information at a rate even faster than that of a supercomputer.

Alison Slinskey Legg, a senior lecturer in Pitt’s School of Biological Sciences, and 10 collaborating investigators have been approved for $300,000 in funding through the National Science Foundation's INCLUDES Program to encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to pursue STEM education and careers. Legg and partners from five Pitt schools will launch a pilot that recruits high school students for STEM precollegiate programs, develops a metric to evaluate those programs, credentials precollege STEM programs based on the metric and introduces a badging system to credit student participants.

Legg’s collaborators on the project are Alaine Allen, David Boone, Jennifer Iriti, Lori Ann Delale-O’Connor, Rebecca Gonda, Mackenzie Ball, Anne Sekula, Kellie Kane, Kashif Henderson and Lina Dostilio. Read more about the project at NSF's site.

Catherine Bender, a professor and Endowed Oncology Chair at Pitt’s School of Nursing, is this year’s recipient of the Oncology Nursing Society’s Distinguished Researcher Award.

Bender was recognized for her research in describing the effects of endocrine therapy with aromatase inhibitors on cognitive function in postmenopausal women with breast cancer. Her studies suggested that compared to matched healthy women, women with breast cancer have poorer executive functioning before they began therapy and that women who received aromatase inhibitors had significantly poorer executive function through the first 18 months of treatment. Bender will present her research results at the ONS Annual Congress next May in Washington, D.C.

A multidisciplinary team of Pitt investigators has received a three-year, $1.44 million NSF grant to build and evaluate a marketplace and a mobile app for multimodal transportation. The marketplace will provide incentives such as discounts at nearby businesses to encourage riders to take a later bus if the next one is full.

The funding will enable the Pitt Smart Living Project to place additional multimodal, realtime transportation information screens around the city. A half-dozen screens are located in Oakland and Downtown in collaboration with TransitScreen, through seed funding from the University.

Principal investigators are Alexandros Labrinidis, Adam J. Lee, Yu-Ru Lin and Konstantinos Pelechrinis of the School of Computing and Information; Sera Linardi of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs; and Kent Harries and Mark Magalotti of the Swanson School of Engineering. External partners include the Port Authority, Healthy Ride, the City of Pittsburgh, the Oakland Business Improvement District and the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership.

Charles “Chuck” Perfetti, a distinguished professor of psychology, has been honored by the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) for his decades of work to demystify how humans learn language. The director of and senior scientist for Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center has spent much of his career at Pitt studying reading and language processing at various stages, including adults who are learning to read Chinese. Perfetti was nominated for the FABBS honor by colleagues recognizing his legacy of scholastic contribution.