Faculty News
Chemistry Honors
The 2005 Priestley Medal, the American Chemical Society’s highest
honor, was awarded to George Olah, USC Distinguished Professor and
Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Chair in Organic Chemistry. In
recognition, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist was featured in a cover
story and feature article in the March 14 issue of Chemical &
Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of ACS.
Sociology and Feminism
Michael Messner, professor of sociology and gender studies, will serve
as the 2006 Sociologists for Women in Society Distinguished Feminist
Lecturer. As distinguished lecturer, he will deliver a talk at two U.S.
university campuses.
Excellence in Mentoring
Gerald Davison, professor and chair of psychology, was awarded a Mellon
Award for Excellence in Mentoring by USC’s Center for Excellence in
Teaching.
Chair of NSF Committee
Anthony Michaels, professor of biological sciences and director of the
USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, has been appointed
chair of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee on
Environmental Research and Education.
Collaborative Success
The U.S. Office of Naval Research awarded a five-year, $5-million
multidisciplinary grant to USC scholars Dani Byrd, associate professor
of linguistics, Shri Narayanan, associate professor of electrical
engineering, linguistics and computer science, and their collaborators
at Stanford and the University of Washington. The funding will support
the project “Human-like Speech Processing.”
Triple Crown
Heather James, associate professor of English and comparative
literature, has scored a triple crown win — she is the recipient of a
senior American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a National
Endowment of the Humanities Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, and
a Huntington Library Research Fellowship.
Lehmann Medal
The American Geophysical Union awarded University Professor Tom Jordan,
W. M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geological Sciences and professor of
earth sciences, the Inge Lehmann Medal in recognition of outstanding
contributions to the understanding of the structure, composition and
dynamics of the Earth’s mantle and core.
L.A.’s Environmental History
As part of a new series on the environmental history of U.S. cities,
history Professor Bill Deverell and Greg Hise, associate professor of
urban planning and history, have co-authored Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
Book Review
Political scientist John Barnes’ book Overruled?
(Stanford University Press, 2004) was reviewed in Perspectives on
Politics. It was called a “great example of persuasive social science
research” by the flagship journal for reviews in political science.
English Honors
Carol Muske-Dukes, professor of English, was named one of four finalists for the California Poet Laureate.
Paleo Pop
Paleontologist David Bottjer wrote an account of he and his colleagues’
remarkable 2004 discovery of the oldest fossils of a bilaterian —
animals that display bilateral symmetry and lived some 580 to 600
million years ago — in the August Scientific American magazine. The
find pushed back the genesis of complex animal life by as many as 50
million years.
Anthropologist Sings on Chinese TV
Earlier this year, Eugene Cooper, a professor of anthropology who
studies Chinese folk customs and trade fairs, plucked his guitar and
sang two Chinese folk songs at Beijing television’s “Arts of Our Land”
competition — a talent show featuring non-Chinese people performing
Chinese skills. With over 100 million viewers tuned in, Cooper captured
second place overall and the “audience favorite” awards.
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