Celebrating the achievements of the FAS community

FAS-wide Awards and Prizes

Named Professorships

• Michael Della Rocca was appointed Sterling Professor of Philosophy.
• Sharon Hammes-Schiffer was appointed Sterling Professor of Chemistry.
• Gary Tomlinson was appointed Sterling Professor of Music and of the Humanities.

• Julia Adams was appointed the Margaret H. Marshall Professor of Sociology.
• Woo-kyoung Ahn was appointed the John Hay Whitney Professor of Psychology.
• Eric Altman was appointed the Roberto C. Goizueta Professor of Chemical Engineering.
• Andrew Barron was appointed the Charles and Dorothea Dilley Professor of Statistics and Data Science.
• Ned Blackhawk was appointed the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies.
• Joseph Chang was appointed the James A. Attwood, Jr. Professor of Statistics and Data Science.
• Paul Franks was appointed the Robert F. and Patricia Weis Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Judaic Studies and of Religious Studies.
• Aaron Gerow was appointed the Alfred W. Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies.
• Jacqueline Goldsby was appointed the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of African American Studies and of English.
• Philip Gorski was appointed the Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Professor of Religious Studies.
• Patrick Holland was appointed the Conkey P. Whitehead Professor of Chemistry.
• Yuichi Kitamura was appointed the Alfred Cowles Professor of Economics and Professor of Management.
• Jennifer Klein was appointed the Durfee Professor of History.
• Nancy Levene was appointed the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Religious Studies.
• Maureen Long was appointed the Bruce D. Alexander ’65 Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
• Fatima Naqvi was appointed the Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Film and Media Studies.
• Laura Wexler was appointed the Charles A. Farnam Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies.

Faculty honors 

The following faculty received honors recognizing the significance of their contributions to their respective fields of study over the course of their careers: 

• Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, received the 2021 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Sociological Association and the 2021 Stockholm Prize in Criminology.
• John Bargh, Professor of Psychology and of Management, received the 2021 CPA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology.
• Dave Bercovici, Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was awarded the Augustus Love Medal by the European Geosciences Union.
• Hui Cao, John C. Malone Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics, received the IEEE Photonics Society Kressel Award and the CAST-USA Outstanding Scientist Award from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology.
• BJ Casey, Professor of Psychology, won the George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience.
• Jonathan Ellman, Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Pharmacology, received the 2021 ACS National Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry.
• Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, Sterling Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, received the 2020 Bourke Award from Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2021 ACS National Award in Theoretical Chemistry, sponsored by the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry, and the 2021 Willard Gibbs Award.
• Mark A. Johnson, Arthur T. Kemp Professor of Chemistry, received the E. Bright Wilson Award in Spectroscopy from the American Chemical Society.
• William L. Jorgensen, Sterling Professor of Chemistry, was selected as a 2021 Citation Laureate.
• Daniel Spielman, Sterling Professor of Computer Science, Statistics and Data Science, Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics, is co-recipient of the inaugural Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory. In addition, along with his frequent collaborator, Shang-Hua Teng, he has received the 20-year STOC Test of Time Award.

FAS and FAS-affiliated faculty have received awards for research, writing, and creative activities across fields that represent the breadth and depth of the FAS: 

• Daphne Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies and of Music, was awarded the 2021 Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound.
• Aimee Cox, Associate Professor of African American Studies and of Anthropology, has been named by NY Live Arts as Lead Scholar of its “Community of Scholars” initiative.
• Maria Doerfler, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, was awarded the prize for Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religions for Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity.
• Ben Glaser, Associate Professor of English, was shortlisted for the MSA First Book prize for Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics.
• Jacqueline Jung, Professor of the History of Art received the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture.
• Amin Karbasi, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Mehraveh Salehi (Ph.D. ’19, Electrical Engineering) won second place at Nokia’s Bell Labs Prize. 
• Christina Kinane, Assistant Professor of Political Science, received the 2021 E.E. Schattschneider Award from the American Political Science Association.
• Daniel Mattingly, Assistant Professor of Political Science, was awarded the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for The Art of Political Control in China.
• Alka Menon, Assistant Professor of Sociology, was awarded the Best Publication Prize by the Body and Embodiment section of the American Sociological Association.
• Laura Newburgh, Assistant Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, and her collaborators at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment won the 2022 Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy.
• Tavia Nyong’o, the William Lampson Professor of Theater Studies and American Studies and Professor of African American Studies, won Honorable Mention for the 2021 Errol Hill Book Award from the American Society for Theater Research for Afro-Fabulations: the Queer Drama of Black Life.
• Jill Richards, Assistant Professor of English, won the MSA First Book prize for The Fury Archives and was also shortlisted for the ASAP prize for her co-authored book The Ferrante Letters.
• Jas Sekhon, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Statistics and Data Science, and Ph.D. student Colleen Chan received the Adobe USD Data Science Research Award.
• Braxton D. Shelley, Associate Professor of Music, of Sacred Music, and of Divinity, was awarded an honorable mention for the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Article Award for “Analyzing Gospel.”
• Shane Vogel, Professor of English and African American Studies, won the 2021 Errol Hill Book Award from the American Society for Theater Research for his co-edited volume Race and Performance after Repetition.
• John Wettlaufer, A.M. Bateman Professor of Geophysics, Mathematics and Physics, served on the committee for the Nobel Prize in Physics and gave the scientific presentation during the award announcement.
• Tyrone Cannon, Clark L. Hull Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry; BJ Casey, Professor of Psychology; Craig Crews, John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Professor of Chemistry, of Pharmacology, and of Management; Michel Devoret, Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics and Physics; Menachem Elimelech, Sterling Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Professor in the School of the Environment; Luigi Frunzio, Senior Research Scientist in Applied Physics; Mark Gerstein, Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, of Computer Science, and of Statistics & Data Science; Steve Girvin, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics; Walter Jetz, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and of Environment; Noah Planavsky, Associate Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences; Robert Schoelkopf, Sterling Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics; Pieter van Dokkum, Sol Goldman Family Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics; Hailiang Wang, Associate Professor of Chemistry; and Fengnian Xia, Barton L. Weller Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering; were included on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list for 2021.
• Books by four FAS faculty members were recognized on the New York Times list of Notable Books of 2021: Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück, Professor in the Practice of Poetry; A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, co-edited by Langdon Hammer, Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English; America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s by Elizabeth Hinton, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies; and Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer, Professor Adjunct of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.

A number of our early career colleagues have been recognized in their fields: 

• Peijun Guo, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, and Ilker Yildirim, Assistant Professor of Psychology and of Statistics and Data Science, were awarded the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award.
• Shu Hu, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, received the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award.
• Stacy Malaker, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, was featured in Editorial: 2021 ASMS “Emerging Investigators” Focus of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
• Martha Muñoz, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, won the George A. Bartholomew Award from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. 
• Michael Murrell, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, was recognized as a Rising Star by the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group.
• Noah Planavsky, Associate Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences, was named a 2021 National Finalist in the Physical Science & Engineering category for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.
• Diana Qiu, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, was awarded the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.
• Lidya Tarhan, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Science was awarded the Donath Medal, given to a young scientist for outstanding achievement by the Geological Society of America.
• Jing Yan, Assistant Professor, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

A number of our colleagues have been elected to academic organizations and academies, or have been named to leadership roles:

• Keith Baker, D. Allan Bromley Professor of Physics, and Adrian Gozar, Research Scientist and Lecturer in Physics, were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.
• Arielle Baskin-Sommers, Associate Professor of Psychology and of Psychiatry, has been named a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
• Michael Donoghue, Sterling Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies, was appointed President of the Botanical Society of America. 
• Menachem Elimelech, Sterling Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Professor in the School of the Environment, has been elected as a member of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE). 
• Rong Fan, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
• Debra Fischer, Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy, has been named Director of the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences.
• Jennifer Richeson, Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
• Hong Tang, Llewellyn West Jones, Jr. Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics & Physics, was named a 2021 Fellow of Optica.
• Fengnian Xia, the Barton L. Weller Associate Professor in Engineering and Science, has been elected as a 2022 Fellow of Optica.

Teaching Awards

Staff Recognition 

40 years of service: 

• Lillian Snipes, Operations Manager, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

35 years of service

• Pamela Buonocore, Operations Manager, Earth and Planetary Sciences
• Essie Lucky-Barros, Undergraduate Registrar, History
• Constance Pascarella, Senior Administrative Assistant, Humanities Program (retired)
• Pamela Green, Senior Administrative Assistant, ISPS

30 years of service

• Patricia Morales de Tirado, Editorial Assistant, Chemistry (retired)
• Janet O’Dell, Administrative Assistant, SEAS (retired)

25 years of service

• Jim Eckert, Research Associate, Earth and Planetary Sciences
• Edward Ginter, Research Development Technician, Chemistry
• Carol McLeman, Lead Administrator, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
• Julie Niemeyer, Chair’s Assistant, Philosophy
• Dorothy Ovelar, Operations Manager, Economics
• Leslie Radcliffe, Administrative Assistant, SEAS (retired)
• Jodie Stewart-Moore, Registrar, African American Studies (retired)