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March 30, 2006

PEOPLE OF THE TIMES

Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg will be among honorees to receive a 2006 Three Rivers Youth Nellie Award on April 7. The award honors community leaders who champion the cause of youth and families.

Three Rivers Youth is a United Way-affiliated agency that provides services to abused, neglected, runaway and homeless youth, ages 12-21, and their families. The private nonprofit agency is celebrating 125 years of working with at-risk youth and families.

Nordenberg will be joined by awardees: the Hon. Cheryl Allen, Allegheny County Criminal Court; Marc Cherna, director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, and Jerlean Daniel, National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Daniel is a former faculty member in Pitt’s School of Education.

Andrew Stockey of WTAE-TV will host the April 7 event, which will include a reception, dinner and program at the Westin Hotel and Convention Center, Downtown.

Proceeds will benefit a scholarship fund and programs and services for youth and families.

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Michael Lovell, associate dean for research and associate professor of industrial engineering at the School of Engineering, is a winner of the 2006 Olympus Emerging Educational Leader Award.

Olympus precision technology designs and delivers solutions for health care and consumer electronics markets worldwide.

The award, offered this year for the first time, recognizes an individual who has inspired innovative thinking in students in a discrete area and who has the potential to make even greater contributions to the field in the future.

Lovell joined John Ochs, professor of mechanical engineering at Lehigh University, and John Kleppe, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Nevada-Reno, as 2006 Olympus award winners.

The winners were honored this week in Portland, Ore., at the 10th annual meeting of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, Olympus’s partner in conducting the awards program.

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Ed Ochester, editor of the Pitt Poetry Series for more than 25 years, was awarded the 2006 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP).

Ochester, professor emeritus of English, was recognized during AWP’s conference this month.

The prize includes a $1,000 honorarium. The award bears the name of writer George Garrett, who made exceptional contributions to his fellow authors as a teacher, mentor and friend. The award is a tribute to Ochester’s “exceptional donations of care, time, labor and money to support writers and their literary accomplishments,” according to AWP.

In addition to serving as editor of the Pitt Poetry Series, Ochester was director of the writing program at Pitt for all but three years from 1978 to 1998. He was twice elected president of AWP, and is the only individual to have served two non-consecutive terms.

Ochester is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington (Vermont) M.F.A. writing seminars, and has been named a distinguished alumnus of the University of Wisconsin. Other academic honors include serving as the Jemison Visiting Professor in Humanities at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and Visiting Distinguished Poet at Wichita State University.

Ochester has authored more than 14 poetry collections, including “The Land of Cockaigne,” “Snow White Horses: Selected Poems,” “Cooking in Key West,” “Changing the Name to Ochester,” “Miracle Mile” and “Dancing on the Edges of Knives.”

He is founding editor, and current co-editor along with Greensburg faculty member Judith Vollmer, of the critically acclaimed literary magazine 5 AM.


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