May 20, 2004

Faculty honors

Two Northwestern faculty members have received major awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

Timothy H. Breen, William Smith Mason Professor of American History, is one of 100 scholars with internationally recognized qualifications to receive a Humboldt Research Award honoring lifetime academic achievement.

Hui Cao, associate professor of physics and astronomy, is among the 10 young scientists and scholars awarded a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Grant in recognition of research achievements to date.

Award winners receive a monetary grant and the opportunity to work on research projects of their choice with colleagues in Germany.

Breen is a Colonial historian interested in the history of political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology. A Guggenheim fellow, he has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study and the National Humanities Center, as well as the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford.

Cao works in the field of experimental condensed-matter physics. Her principal research interest is optical processes in nanostructures, focusing on photon localization and coherent light generation in random media, and control of light-matter interaction in semiconductor microcavities and photonic crystals.

P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, professor of human development and social policy, has been elected by her peers as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association for 2004.

APA Fellows are selected for their exceptional and outstanding contributions to the research, teaching or practice of psychology. Fellows must also demonstrate the national impact of their work, such as numerous research-based publications, leadership roles within psychology or community service in their clinical practice.

Chase-Lansdale is a senior developmental psychologist whose research addresses how aspects of the social environment, such as poverty, neighborhood characteristics, early parenthood, family structures and maternal employment affect children, adolescents and families. She is co-principal investigator of a multi-disciplinary, multi-site study, “Welfare Children and Families: a Three-City Study.”

Thomas McDade, assistant professor of anthropology, has been honored by President Bush with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the nation’s highest honor for professionals at the outset of their independent research careers.

He was honored in a White House ceremony presided over by John H. Marburger III, Science Advisor to the President and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers honors the most promising beginning researchers in the nation within their fields. McDade was nominated for the award by the National Science Foundation.

McDade’s research addresses the dynamic interrelationships among biology, culture and individual psychosocial environments, with an emphasis on integrative, population-based research on human biology and health. As a director of the recently established Laboratory for Human Biology Research in the anthropology department, McDade has developed a number of minimally invasive methods for assessing human physiology and health.

Dominic Missimi, professor of theatre and director of music theatre, has been honored with the Crystal Award by the Chicago Drama League in recognition of his “devotion to developing the talent of students so that they enter the world of professional theatre with skill and confidence.”

Former recipients of this award have included the late Ardis Krainik (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Adjunct Professor Robert Falls (Goodman Theatre), Barbara Gaines (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre), Professor of performance studies Frank Galati (Steppenwolf Theatre) and assistant professor of performance studies Mary Zimmerman (Lookingglass Theatre Company).

Missimi, the Donald G. Robertson Professor of Music Theatre, is director of the Certificate Program in Musical Theatre. Previously, he had served as head of the Master of Fine Arts Directing Program and summer programs.

Dylan C. Penningroth, associate professor of history, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians to receive the Avery O. Craven Award for the most original book on the Civil War or the era of Reconstruction

The book, “The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South,” uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life. He studies the social and cultural meanings of property’s production and ownership among enslaved people in both West Africa and the United States.

Penningroth’s special interests are in the history of slavery and emancipation, property and family, and African Studies.

Thomas A. Volpe, assistant professor of cell and molecular biology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, was awarded the 2003 Newcomb Cleveland Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award recognizes the author or authors of an outstanding article published in the journal Science.

Volpe and colleagues will receive a share of the $25,000 prize and a bronze medal for their research article, “Regula-tion of Heterochromatic Silencing and Histone H3 Lysine-9 Methylation by RNAi,” which was published Sept. 13, 2002.

Volpe’s laboratory uses fission yeast Schizosaccharamyces pombe as a model to study formation of heterochromatin, which plays several pivotal roles in the cell, including gene expression and chromosome segregation.