Accolades

Sandeep Chakravorty, the Consul General of India in New York (pictured), had a recent whirlwind visit to campus in March to celebrate the establishment of a new Chair of Indian Studies at Pitt. A rotating scholar from India, who will teach in different Pitt departments, will be in the post for each of the next five years beginning in January 2019. The move is a partnership with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), an organization that works to promote a wider understanding of Indian culture and history. Chakravorty met with Pitt leaders to discuss the chair as part of the Asian Studies Center's new India initiative. A reception at the Frick Fine Arts cloister was followed by dinner with the local South Asian community, breakfast with staff from Pitt’s Asian Studies Center and an informal meeting over coffee with a group of 15 students interested in Indian studies.

“There’s tremendous enthusiasm about this new chair,” said Joseph Alter, director of the Asian Studies Center. “He or she will teach a course on modern Indian culture and help to develop programming that serves the interests of students who want to learn more about this significant region of the world.”

The Immigration and Ethnic History Society has chosen Pitt faculty member Rachel Kranson’s book “Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America” for an honorable mention in the society’s First Book Award competition. Kranson is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies within the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. In her book, Kranson examines how American Jews after World War II felt conflicted about their rising economic status. While they enjoyed their new, middle-class lifestyles, they also suspected that this success compromised their authenticity as Jews.

The European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship Programme has awarded Pitt faculty member Todd Reeser a senior residential fellowship based at the Collegium de Lyon, an interdisciplinary research center in Lyon, France. Reeser is a professor of French and the director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. The highly competitive fellowship will provide him time to write his next book “Transgender France” and to conduct archival work in French archives. The fellowship, which begins in July 2018, will also allow him to join a research team at the Max Weber Center exploring gender and sexuality.

The HIV Prevention and Care Project at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health turns 25 years old this year.

The project started in 1993 with a one-year grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Health to assist and educate HIV prevention providers and the state HIV prevention planning body. Today, it has 12 staff and three faculty members who run four programs focusing on direct prevention interventions, capacity building and training, statewide integrated HIV planning with the Department of Health and the diffusion of novel, effective community programs for vulnerable communities.

The project’s work has received multiple recognitions from federal health bodies in recent years, helping Pennsylvania set the national standard in several respects for integrated HIV planning.

Jennifer Silk (left) and Erika Forbes have been named fellows of the Association for Psychological Science. The national honor recognizes “sustained outstanding contributions to the advancement of psychological science.” Their election to fellow status places them among the country’s most lauded researchers and teachers with over a decade of postdoctoral contributions.

Silk, an associate professor of psychology, and Forbes, a professor of psychiatry, both study the development of depression and anxiety in adolescents. Silk’s work looks at how teens’ emotional reactivity and regulation change during this crucial developmental period, and how these changes look different for people who develop anxiety and depression. Forbes studies reward circuits in the brain for clues as to how mood problems and substance abuse develop.  

“The prevention and treatment of anxiety and depressive disorders in teens is a timely issue, and Pitt has a longstanding history of breaking ground in this area,” Silk said.

“Being named an APS fellow is a great honor, and it feels even more valuable to be named at the same time as a distinguished colleague and longtime collaborator,” Forbes added.

Two new research collaborations led by Götz Veser, professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, aim to boost manufacturing industries in America’s Rust Belt. The research is backed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and totals nearly $10 million.

One project is a collaboration between Pitt and Ohio-based chemical manufacturer Lubrizol that aims to replace Lubrizol’s current practice of batch processing chemicals with continuous processing; the latter gives much greater control over the processing conditions of chemicals. Veser's other project aims to find an efficient way to convert methane to benzene, a key part of sustainable processing that has not yet been commercialized due to low efficiency.

Read more about the grants at the Swanson School of Engineering's website.

David Beck, an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Physician Assistant Studies Program, has been recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Physician Assistants for exemplary achievement in service to the profession, the advancement of health care and in dedication to the community. This honor is bestowed upon an elite group of less than one percent of practicing PAs.

Beck studies the application and evaluation of transformative learning in educating health professionals, among other topics.

Pitt Department of Music Chair Deane Root has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of American Music, which is a member of the Council of Learned Societies and a group of which Root was a founding member. At the society’s international conference in March, Root was lauded for his accomplishments — his deep and wide-ranging contributions to the study of American music; preserving and growing the Foster Hall Collection at the Stephen Foster Memorial and the archives of Pitt’s Center for American Music, of which he is director; and his successful initiative Voices Across Time, in which teachers from across the country come to Pitt’s main campus to learn how to integrate American music into social studies and language arts classes.

Root is an author, editor in chief of Grove Music Online, an educator, a mentor of young scholars and a past president of the Society of American Music. As its representative said when Root received the award, “Deane has exercised consistent leadership ... and has been at the forefront of musical discovery in a broad range of areas.”

The University in 2017 posted its lowest-ever employee injury rate of 1.0, calculated in incidents per 100 full-time workers. 

Jay Frerotte, director of Pitt’s Department of Environmental Health and Safety, attributed the downward trend to ongoing efforts to enhance the University’s longstanding culture of workplace safety.

National figures have yet to be posted for 2017, but the University’s employee injury rate consistently has been below the national average for colleges and universities since the start of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ current industry classification system in 2003. That year, the Pittsburgh campus rate was 1.8 compared to a national average of 2.7.

By 2016, Pitt’s rate declined to less than 1.2 — a campus low at that time  — compared with a national average of 1.9.