Accolades

The University of Pittsburgh was again named among the world’s top 50 universities in the 2020 U.S. News & World Report’s Best Global Universities rankings. Pitt landed at No. 47, tied with University of Minnesota.

In the latest ranking, the magazine evaluated a list of the world’s top 1,500 universities — which includes institutions from the U.S. and more than 80 other countries. The universities were rated based on 13 different indicators measuring their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations.

Several Pitt programs ranked in the top 50 by subject, including Surgery at No. 3, Clinical Medicine at No. 18 and Psychiatry/Psychology at No. 19.

Other programs in the top 50 are:

• No. 23: Neuroscience and Behavior
• No. 23: Oncology
• No. 34: Pharmacology and Toxicology (tied with University of Pennsylvania)
• No. 36: Arts and Humanities
• No. 39: Immunology
• No. 42: Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems
• No. 49: Microbiology (tied with University of Toronto)

Pitt students come from 108 countries and all 50 states, in addition to the U.S. Territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Internationally, most students come from China, India and Korea. 

Rebecca Thurston, professor of Psychiatry, Clinical and Translational Science, Epidemiology and Psychology, has been named 2019-2020 president of the North American Menopause Society. 

“It is a privilege to lead this fantastic organization devoted to the study and care of midlife women,” Thurston said.

Thurston is an expert in the field of mid- and late-life women’s mental and cardiovascular health. Her research has transformed the understanding of numerous behavioral health issues underlying women’s cardiovascular health, including the link between hot flashes and cardiovascular disease and the relationship of psychosocial issues such as depression, anxiety and poverty to cardiovascular disease.

Twelve faculty members in the natural sciences departments in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences were recently awarded the Discipline-based Science Education Research (Db-SERC) Leader Award.

This yearly award recognizes and celebrates the contributions to the Db-SERC faculty learning community, which promotes and supports evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning in the natural sciences, and their active participation in many Db-SERC events during the past academic year.

 Db-SERC Leader Award winners (2018-2019 year):

• Peter Bell, Chemistry

• Russell Clark, Physics and Astronomy

• Sean Garrett-Roe, Chemistry

• Joe Grabowski, Chemistry

• Ericka Huston, Chemistry

• Kirill Kiselyov, Biological Sciences

• Barb Kucinski, Psychology

• James Mueller, Physics and Astronomy

• David Nero, Physics and Astronomy

• Welkin Pope, Biological Sciences

• Jackie Powell, Chemistry

• Brianna Reed, Biological Sciences

Find more information about Db-SERC here.

Willa Doswell, associate professor in the School of Nursing, has been named a 2019 Woman of Excellence by the New Pittsburgh Courier.

The awards are given annually to 50 African-American women who have made significant contributions to the community.

Doswell will be recognized at a luncheon in downtown Pittsburgh on Dec. 12. She is also a member of the Internal Advisory Council for Pitt’s Community Engagement Centers.

Jill Krantz has been named the executive director of campus recreation.

Krantz will oversee the construction of the new wellness and recreation center scheduled to open in 2023 — one of the largest construction projects in recent campus history.

Additionally, Krantz will be responsible for the oversight and management of other campus recreation facilities, operations, personnel, budget, fitness, aquatics and outdoor programs, as well as programs and services including both intramural and club recreation sports. She will also support University-wide initiatives and events pertaining to student wellness. 

“Jill has the demonstrated leadership ability, professional knowledge and enthusiasm to lead the University in this next stage of campus development,” said Dean of Students Kenyon Bonner. “My team and I are looking forward to working closely with Jill as she gets to know Pitt and brings her own vision for how to best serve our students, staff and faculty.”  

“I’m honored to be joining the University of Pittsburgh and to be part of supporting its exceptional commitment to recreation and wellness,” Krantz said. “It’s especially exciting to be involved in helping to shape the future of campus recreation and to work with an incredible team.”

Krantz served for more than six years as associate athletics director and department director of intramural-recreational sports at the University of Virginia. Before her tenure at UVA, Krantz served as the facility manager at the Chilson Recreation/Senior Center in Loveland, Colo.; as a principal with GreenPlay, LLC; as the recreation and tourism director/instructor in the School of Business at the University of Colorado; and as the recreation supervisor for Onslow County, N.C. She is an active member of the National Recreation and Park Association and of NIRSA: Leaders in Collegiate Recreation.

Lauren O. Wallace (BUS ’12, EDUC ’12G), director of recruitment in the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, has been named an honoree to the 40 Under 40 List by Pittsburgh Magazine and Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project.

The award annually recognizes 40 “outstanding” individuals who meet the age requirement whose “creativity, vision and passion” enrich the Pittsburgh region. Since 1998, artists, entrepreneurs, doctors, educators, nonprofit executives and public figures have been among the recipients of this honor.

Wallace is also currently enrolled in the Doctor of Education Program in the School of Education.

New faculty members with backgrounds vital to building expertise in the School of Computing and Information (SCI) have recently joined the school, which was established in 2017 as Pitt's first new school in 20 years..

“SCI is very excited to welcome 18 new faculty,” said Paul Cohen, founding dean. “Each faculty member has a deep understanding of cross-disciplinary collaboration and a commitment to furthering SCI’s mission of making the world a better place through polymathic education and the science of interacting systems.”

SCI welcomed the following faculty at the start of the fall 2019 term:

• Wonsun Ahn, visiting lecturer, obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Samsung Frontier founding member. His research interests include computer architecture, compiler optimization, scripting languages, speculative parallelization and parallel computing.
• Katharine Anderson, visiting assistant professor, models and analyzes the structure, formation and dynamics of scientific collaboration networks, skill diversity and synergy and the complexities of human capital. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan in 2010.
• Amy Babay, assistant professor, focuses on modeling and designing new internet services with demanding performance requirements and on building dependable critical infrastructure systems. Babay received her Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
• Jacob Biehl, associate professor, comes to Pitt after a decade with FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Fuji Xerox’s computer science research laboratory in Silicon Valley, California. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008.
• Seong Jae Hwang, assistant professor, concentrates his research on medical imaging, computer vision and machine learning with an emphasis on modeling disease progression. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019.
• Stephen Lee, assistant professor. His research interests span several areas of computer systems, including distributed systems and cyber-physical systems, with an emphasis on domains such as smart cities, smart buildings and transportation. He earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019.
• Eleanor “Nora” Mattern (SCI ’14G), teaching assistant professor. Mattern returns to Pitt, where she earned her PhD, after serving as a librarian at the University of Chicago. Prior, she held a joint visiting position with the University Library System’s Digital Scholarship Services and SCI at Pitt. With SCI, she previously taught courses in preservation, archival ethics and metadata and archival access systems and developed experiential learning projects.
• Luis de Oliveira, visiting lecturer, graduated from the University of Porto, Portugal, with a Ph.D. in 2016, with a thesis focused on wireless communications and localization for small teams of mobile robots. His current research interests are the preservation of reproducible software execution, real time communication protocols for teams of mobile agents and anchorless localization using RF signals.
• Song Shi, visiting assistant professor, does research on new media interventions for development and social change initiated by activists, NGOs and the government as detailed in his monograph “China and the Internet: Using New Media for Development in Social Change.” Shi received his Ph.D. in communication and media studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013.
• Xulong Tang, assistant professor. His research interests include modeling and designing high-performance computing and parallel computer architectures and systems. He earned his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the Penn State in 2019.
• Lingfei Wu, assistant professor, is a computational social scientist whose current research aims at unleashing the power of artificial neural network techniques to overcome cognitive and social constraints of human knowledge creation. Additionally, Wu co-founded one of the largest non-governmental science associations in China, which is the incubator of three million-dollar AI startups in self-driving, natural language processing and urban planning.
• Joseph Yurko, teaching assistant professor, has a background that spans both machine learning and traditional engineering applications. He comes to Pitt from Arconic, a manufacturing company, where he served as a data scientist. He earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Additional faculty who joined SCI in the last academic year:

• Kayla Booth, research assistant professor. Her research interests include diversity and social inclusion, social and health informatics, and social media. She obtained her Ph.D. from Penn State.
• Matt Burton, lecturer, was previously a visiting assistant professor at SCI before becoming a lecturer. His research interests focus on infrastructure studies, data science, and scholarly communication. He holds a Ph.D. in information from the University of Michigan.
• Timothy Hoffman, lecturer, is a former corporate trainer for software development and former assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His interests center on developing software tools to streamline the grading and administrative aspects of course management, along with tools to assist department researchers working on issues such as early identification of struggling students, tools for tutoring and remedial work for struggling students and the gathering of meta data relating to pedagogy.
• Vinicius Petrucci, lecturer, was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science at Fluminese Federal University in 2012. 
• Marcia Rapchak, lecturer. Her research interests span multiple areas and include information literacy, academic libraries, computer-supported collaborative learning and critical librarianship. She obtained her Ed.D. from Duquesne University and has several recent publications. Rapchak is the 2018 recipient of the Routledge Distance Learning Librarianship Conference Sponsorship Award.
• Erin Walker, associate professor, completed her in Ph.D. in 2010 at Carnegie Mellon in Human-Computer interaction. Her research uses interdisciplinary methods to improve the design and implementation of educational technology and then to understand when and why it is effective.

Bruce Childers, who currently serves as senior associate dean in the School of Computing and Information and professor of Computer Science, will take on an additional role in the Office of the Provost as special assistant to the provost for Data Science.

Over the next two years, Childers will collaborate across the University to develop policies and examine opportunities regarding data science. As a first step, he will help the provost to populate and charge the Task Force on Data Science. The task force will work to further propel Pitt’s educational and research mission through data in all its forms.

According to a message from Provost Ann Cudd, “Many academic units at the University of Pittsburgh recognize this need and are responding individually with initiatives around data science. We have a burgeoning variety of ‘analytics,’ ‘digital,’ ‘computational,’ ‘informatics,’ and ‘-omics,’ in fields as far flung as business, health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, as well as adaptive learning and student advising platforms. Coordinating and collaborating on these activities could leverage our collective ability, jointly build capacity to meet the demand, and foster opportunities for new interdisciplinary educational and research programs.”

Two Pitt projects will get a big boost from grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• David J. Birnbaum, professor and chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, was awarded an Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grant. The $249,456 award will support “Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text and Making the Edition,” a two-week summer institute on the theory and development of digital scholarly editions.
• Kathryn Haines, associate director of the Center for American Music in the University Library System, received a Landmarks of American History Grant of $169,803 to support “The Homestead Steel Strike and the Growth of America as an Industrial Power,” a two one-week workshops for K-12 educators.

The awards were part of $29 million total in grants to fund 215 humanities projects and programs across the country to “support vital research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.”