May 27, 2004

Faculty honors

Guillermo A. Ameer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is the recipient of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award.

The award recognizes his effort to develop methods to control the micro-architecture of engineered tissues, specifically using a three-dimensional polymer template technique that he is currently developing in his lab. By controlling the micro-architecture of biodegradable scaffolds that guide the growth of cells, Ameer hopes to improve the functionality of the resulting tissue.

His technique would be applicable to engineering micro vascular networks, ligament, and salivary glands (to address the inevitable loss of salivary gland function due to radiation treatment for head or neck cancers).

Ameer was recently named to the 2003 list of the world’s top 100 young innovators by Technology Review magazine.

Elizabeth Buccheri, senior lecturer in music performance studies, received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from North Park University during the school’s 111th commencement ceremony.

Buccheri is the founder and music director of the Chamber Music Concert Series at North Park University where she assumed the title of Distinguish-ed Visiting Professor of Music in the fall of 1995.

A chamber musician and vocal coach, Buccheri also has been the assistant conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago since 1987. She received a doctor of musical arts and a performer’s certificate in piano from the Eastman School of Music.

Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism, has been elected vice president of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC) for the year beginning Oct. 1.

He will become ASJMC president-elect on Oct. 1, 2005, and president in the year beginning Oct. 1, 2006.

The ASJMC is an association of about 200 administrators from journalism and mass communications programs in the United States and abroad.

Ghiglione previously served as director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California (1999-2001) and as director of Emory’s journalism program and its James M. Cox Professor of Journalism (1996-99).

From1969 to 1995 he owned and operated Worcester County Newspapers and edited and published its Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News.

Three Northwestern faculty members have received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. They are Jason Eckardt, composer and lecturer in music composition; Douglas Medin, professor of psychology; and Tamar Seideman, professor of chemistry.

Jason Eckardt played guitar in rock and jazz bands until hearing the music of Webern inspired an interest in composing. His music is influenced by his interests in perceptual complexity, performance virtuosity and self-organizing processes in the natural world.

Eckardt has been recognized through commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Koussevitzky Foundation, Guggenheim Museum, Fromm Foundation at Harvard University and Oberlin Conservatory, and major festivals have programmed his works.

Douglas Medin is interested in issues of culture and cognition, concept and classification learning, decision-making, and learning and memory. He has conducted cross-cultural research on biological concepts in Peten, Guatemala, and among Native American, Amish and majority culture people in Wisconsin.

They include studies of the use of categories in reasoning, environmental decision-making and links between cultural differences in mental models of nature and inter-group conflict over natural resources. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have supported his work.

Medin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Tamar Seideman conducts research at the broad interface among chemistry, physics and materials science. She is specifically interested in current-driven dynamics in molecular-scale devices with applications to molecular machines and surface nanochemistry; coherent control of matter by light and of light by matter; molecular optics; and intense-pulse alignment and three-dimensional alignment in the gas and solution phases.

A fellow of the American Physical Society, Seideman has received Fulbright, Wegner and von Humboldt research awards and held several visiting professorships.

Vassiliki Kalogera, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, has been awarded a Cottrell Scholar Award, one of 11 granted this year by the Research Corporation. 

The Cottrell Awards are designed for young faculty members in Ph.D. granting astronomy, chemistry, and physics departments in United States and Canadian universities. The purpose of the awards is to “enable recipients to implement their plans to become outstanding scientists and educators as well as tomorrow’s academic and scientific leaders.”

Kalogera recently received two other awards — a 2002 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering and the 2002 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy from the American Association of University Women and the American Astronomical Society.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has chosen Ishwar Radhakrishnan, assistant professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, to receive its Scholar Award in recognition of his research accomplishments.

Radhakrishnan’s research interests are in the areas of structural biology and informatics, with emphasis on transcription regulation and monoubiquitin signaling. He is attempting to clarify the structural and thermodynamic basis of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions that regulate the assembly and recruitment of molecular machines which perform complex functions in the cell.

The March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation awarded Radhakrishnan a Basil O’Connor Starter Scholarship in 2001. He is a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehen-sive Cancer Center of Northwest-ern University and the Center for Genetic Medicine and serves as co-director of the Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

Rosalind Ramsey-Goldman, M.D., professor of medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has been elected to a five-year terms as chair of the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics Group (SLICC).

Established in 1986, the SLICC group consists of clinical lupus investigators in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, Mexico, Germany, Iceland, Switzerland and Korea.

SLICC members have developed standardized measures for lupus disease activity, damage, patient self-assessment and interventional outcome analysis.

Goldman also has received a $100,000 grant and will be the principal investigator at Northwestern on a grant from the Lupus Clinical Trials Consortium (LCTC), a new nonprofit organization that has been established to facilitate clinical trials for people with lupus. The LCTC has identified Northwest-ern as one of a network of 27 institutions that will launch the program.

Goldman also has been selected to be on the LCTC scientific coordinating committee.

Julia R. Weertman, Walter P. Murphy Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering, has been honored by the American Society for Metals (ASM) International and the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS).

She will receive the ASM Gold Medal in September 2005 and the Robert F. Mehl Award from the TMS in March 2006.

The ASM cited Weertman “for outstanding contributions throughout a distinguished career in the field of materials science and engineering, excellence in teaching, service on government advisory committees, and seminal research on high temperature materials and nanomaterials.”

Weertman’s previous honors include two Special Creativity Awards for Research from the National Science Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Leadership Award from the TMS, and the 2003 von Hippel Award from the Materials Research Society.