Accolades

Pitt’s chief financial officer, Senior Vice Chancellor Arthur G. Ramicone, has announced he will retire at the end of August, ending a 30-year career at Pitt. 

Ramicone began working at Pitt in 1988 as a manager of internal audit. He worked his way through the ranks and today oversees 14 departments, ranging from payroll to risk management. 

He is credited with implementing a number of new systems and upgrades over the years, including a data warehouse and a new travel management program, which itself has generated significant cost savings for Pitt.

“In the last 30 years, Art has made lasting contributions to the strength of this University,” said Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher. “He is a leader known for his honesty, integrity and sense of humor — and for bringing great teams together to tackle the right challenges. As a result, the University finds itself in an enviable position of exceptional financial strength.”

The University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business is in good company. Katz’s MBA program is one of the best for return on investments nationally, according to a ranking from Social Finance (SoFi), a student loan refinancing company.

SoFi said Pitt’s Katz school, Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business were the only three schools whose graduates have excellent salaries and relatively low loan obligations. This is the first time the Katz school has been included in the SoFi ranking, which is developed independently of school-reported figures and instead uses data from 60,000 student loan refinancing applications the company received between January 2014 and December 2017.

Katz’s MBA graduates received the sixth best return on investment and the program ranked 17th in highest salary. It’s the second best return on investment and fourth highest salary among public programs ranked by SoFi.

The North Central Sociological Association recognized a Pitt faculty member’s paper on the perpetuation of racism in the United States with the association’s Scholarly Achievement Award. Waverly Duck and Bentley University faculty member Anne Warfield Rawls cowrote “‘Fractured Reflections’ of High-Status Black Male Presentations of Self: Nonrecognition of Identity as a ‘Tacit’ Form of Institutional Racism.” Duck is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology within the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Published in the journal Sociological Focus, the article says that black men encounter racism even at higher levels of status.

Patricia Kroboth, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and the Dr. Gordon J. Vanscoy Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, will be given the 2018 American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Student Pharmacists (APhA-ASP) Outstanding Dean Award at the association’s annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 16-19.

The award recognizes a school or college of pharmacy dean who has made significant contributions to the APhA-ASP Chapter and promoted with distinction the welfare of student pharmacists through various community service, leadership and professional activities. The award was established in 2004.

Two current art exhibitions — one in Detroit and one in the Bronx, New York — feature works by Pitt Professor Emeritus of Studio Arts Paul Glabicki. An internationally acclaimed multimedia artist, Glabicki taught in Pitt’s Department of Studio Arts for 40 years and served as its chair from 2000-2003.  

HUMAN/NATURE: Selections from the Kim Foster Gallery is already underway at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University in Detroit and runs through March 23. Each artist, including Glabicki, examines the journey toward decoding the relationship between humans and nature, and how humans are organically drawn to consider this connection.

TICK-TOCK: Time in Contemporary Art runs Feb. 20 through May 5 at the Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx. Glabicki and the other artists were inspired by traditional and contemporary tools we use to chart time, from clocks and calendars to sundials and stopwatches.

Pitt faculty member David Pettersen has been inducted into the Ordre des Palmes académiques (Order of the Academic Palms) as a Chevalier (Knight) by the French government. The honor, said Pittsburgh’s Honorary French Consul Jean-Dominique Le Garrec, recognizes Pettersen’s efforts in establishing a faculty exchange between Pitt and the Université Lumière Lyon 2, his contributions to the expansion of French culture around the world and his research and writing about French literature and cinema. Pettersen is an associate professor of French and film and media studies and the associate director of the newly renamed Film and Media Studies Program in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. He will be recognized at an award ceremony in February.

Doug Weber, associate professor of bioengineering, and Lee Fisher, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, were one of four University of Pittsburgh teams to receive a $5.3 million National Institutes of Health BRAIN award. 

The pair will research ways to eliminate phantom limb pain, a phenomenon where amputees feel pain from the missing limb, which can be long-lasting and severe. They will investigate how electric stimulation may both counter phantom limb pain and improve movement and balance in patients. If successful, improvements in sensory feedback could improve the quality of life for prosthetics users.

Tristen Inagaki and Jamie Hanson have been named 2017 Rising Stars by the Association for Psychological Science, the leading international organization devoted to advancing psychology across disciplines. The Rising Star award is given to newly minted PhDs whose earliest work has already shown promise for broad impact far into the future of the field.

Inagaki is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Using methods from social and health psychology, as well as pharmacology and affective neuroscience, she studies how we form and maintain social connections, and how those bonds positively influence our mental and physical health.

Hanson is an assistant professor of psychology and a research scientist at Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center. His work focuses on the neural circuitry that children and adolescents use to learn about different aspects of their environment. He also studies how such circuits are shaped by early life stress and why neural changes due to this stress confer risks for negative outcomes.

Brian Primack, dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s University Honors College, will address faculty, students and guests as speaker of Pitt’s 42nd annual Honors Convocation at 3 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 23, at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. Primack is also the Bernice L. and Morton S. Lerner Endowed Chair; the director of the Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health; and a professor of medicine, pediatrics, and clinical and translational science. He was named leader of the University Honors College in summer 2017.