Accolades

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.

Four Pitt undergraduate students have been honored with David L. Boren Scholarships from the National Security Education Program. The scholarships will provide up to $20,000 for Pitt’s winners to partake in extended study endeavors in Brazil, China, South Korea and Tanzania.

Katherine Andrews, of York, Pennsylvania, is entering her senior year as a political science major with certificates in global and Latin American studies. She will study Portuguese through the Council on International Education and Exchange in the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, beginning in January.

Matthew Eskuchen, of Cinnaminson, New Jersey, a fourth-year biology major and chemistry minor with a conceptual foundations of medicine certificate, will study Mandarin at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in China starting in January.

Capri Gaines, of Randallstown, Maryland, entering her senior year as a political science and urban studies major and U.S. Army reservist, is studying Korean at the Korea University in Seoul, South Korea until December.

Nora Wagman, of Villanova, Pennsylvania, a fourth-year economics major with a global studies certificate focusing on global economy and Chinese, is studying Swahili through the African Flagship Languages Initiative in Arusha, Tanzania until March 2018.

The David L. Boren Awards for International Study are named for the principal author of the legislation that created the National Security Education Program in 1991. The program focuses on geographic areas, language, and fields of study critical of U.S. national security including sustainable development global disease and hunger, population growth and migration, and environmental degradation. In exchange for funding, Boren Scholars commit to working in the federal government for at least a year after undergraduate or graduate school. 

Lauren Jonkman, an assistant professor in the pharmacy and therapeutics department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, was selected as a 2017-18 Fulbright Scholar to support the development of a primary care clinical pharmacy practice at the University of Namibia School of Pharmacy. The Fulbright Program is supported by the U.S. Department of State through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Jonkman will support teaching and research at the University of Namibia, focusing specifically on their new Master of Clinical Pharmacy Program. She has been working with faculty and students from the Namibian university's School of Pharmacy since 2015.

Valerie Watzlaf, associate professor in Pitt's Department of Health Information Management, was recently elected president of the American Health Information Management Association. Watzlaf joins another Pitt professor from the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences who has also served as AHIMA's president — Department Chair Mervat Abdelhak, who was elected in 2005. Along with her involvement in several professional and scientific societies, Watzlaf serves on the editorial advisory boards for several peer-reviewed scientific journals and is chair of AHIMA's Council for Excellence in Education.

Richard McMahon, director of Dining Services for Chartwells Higher Education at Pitt-Greensburg, was the recognized with an Outstanding Performance Award from Compass Group, the parent company of Chartwells. The award recognized McMahon for his 33 years of service with the Chartwells Sector. McMahon's other awards include being the recipient of Pitt-Greensburg’s 2015 President’s Medal for Distinguished Service.