September 25, 2003

Faculty honors

Two faculty members in the department of political science, Karen J. Alter and Edward Gibson, have received fellowships for 2003-04 from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation administered by Brown University.

Their selection marks the first time the foundation has made two awards to members of the same university.

Alter, an associate professor, specializes in international relations theory, organizations and law, and European integration and politics. Her research examines how the creation and increasing use of international legal mechanisms is changing international politics.

She is the author of “Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe” (2001) and numerous articles and book chapters on the European Union’s legal system.

In 2000-01, Alter was a German Marshall Fund research fellow and a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She is on the editorial board of European Union Politics and the executive committee of the European Communities Studies Association.

Gibson, Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and associate professor of political science, is interested in comparative politics, political development, democratization and Latin American politics. His current research addresses the impact of regional coalition building and federalist institutions on politics and policy making in Latin America and the United States.

He is the author of “Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective” (1996) and the editor of “Federalism and Democracy in Latin America,” to be published this year.

Gibson was the first political scientist to receive a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. He was an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

L. Catherine Brinson, professor of mechanical engineering, has been selected to receive the 2003 Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

The award, to be conferred at the ASME annual meeting in November, honors Brinson for her “distinguished contributions to the area of high performance composites and intelligent material systems.”

Brinson's research interests are in the study of advanced material systems and developing new methods to characterize and model them at scales spanning molecular interactions and micromechanical and macroscopic behavior. She has studied so-called smart materials such as shape memory alloys, as well as polymer composite systems and nanotube reinforced polymers. Advanced materials are those that synergistically combine advantages of two or more materials, materials that act as both control elements and structural elements, and microstructurally designed materials. Her work emphasizes the influence of molecular scale mechanisms and environmental conditions on macroscopic mechanical properties.

NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have supported her research.

Brinson has also received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship Award and an NSF CAREER Award.