November 3, 2005

Faculty honors

Dante R. Chialvo, M.D., research associate professor of physiology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture and conduct research at the University of Cordoba, Argentina. He will work with the faculty of mathematics, astronomy and physics in the department of physics.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic achievement and for demonstrating extraordinary leadership potential in their fields.

In their research of the human brain, Chialvo and an international group of colleagues have shown that tens of thousands of discrete brain regions form a network that has the same qualitative features as other complex networks, such as the Internet and social and metabolic networks. Two fundamental features in each of these are the “small world” property whereby few jumps are necessary for connecting any two nodes, and in-homogeneity, or selected “super-connected” nodes which act as hubs providing fast transmission of information.

J. Larry Jameson, Cutter Professor of Medicine and chair, department of medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has been elected a member of the Institute of Medicine.

The IOM was established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences to honor professional achievement in the health sciences.

Jameson is internationally recognized for his research, which has defined the genetic basis of more than a dozen different endocrine disorders. He has a long-standing interest in the genetics of endocrine tumors and possible approaches to their treatment.

Jameson is the standard bearer for molecular medicine in the field of endocrinology. He is co-editor of the fourth and the fifth editions of the authoritative text, DeGroot and Jameson’s Endocrinology. His book Principles of Molecular Medicine received the Best Health Science Book of 1998 award.

E. Patrick Johnson, associate professor of performance studies and director of the department’s graduate studies program, is the recipient of the Martin Duberman Fellowship for his book project, “Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men of the South.”

The fellowship from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in honor of its founder, Martin Duberman, is awarded to a senior scholar doing research on the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer experience.

Tobin J. Marks, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Catalytic Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected by its membership to the Leopoldina, the German Academy of Natural Scientists. He is the first professor from Northwestern elected to the Leopoldina.

Founded in 1652, the Leopoldina is the world’s oldest academy of natural sciences. Disciplines represented include the natural sciences, medicine, engineering, the social sciences and the history of science and medicine. Members come from all over the globe, and membership is restricted to no more than 1,000 scientists.

Marks’ research focuses on the design, synthesis and in-depth characterization of new materials having important chemical, physical and/or biological properties. Specifically, he studies and designs single molecules in order to make better catalysts for new kinds of plastics, while in his molecular optoelectronics work Marks designs arrays of “smart” molecules that will self-assemble into, or spontaneously form, structures that can conduct electricity, switch light on and off, or emit and detect light. These structures could lead to the world’s most versatile and stable light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as well as to numerous types of organic transistors.

Mark Reinecke, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and chief of the division of psychology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has been elected a Fellow of the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. 

Fellow status is an honor bestowed upon members of the American Psychological Association who have made unusual and outstanding contributions to the field of psychology, and whose work has had a national impact. 

Reinecke’s research and clinical interests include childhood depression and suicide, cognitive and social vulnerability for depression, and predictors and mechanism of treatment response.

Hermann Riecke, professor of engineering science and applied mathematics, has received a Humboldt Research Award.

The Humboldt Award is conferred in recognition of lifetime achievements in research and allows the recipient to carry out projects with specialists in Germany.

The grants will support Riecke’s research at the Max-Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. He and colleagues at the Institute will develop a mathematical model for the complex information processing of the zebrafish olfactory system.

Ted Spiegel, professor emeritus of integrated marketing communications at the Medill School of Journalism, has been inducted into the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame.

Spiegel began his career in direct marketing in 1957 in the Spiegel “family business” that mailed its now famous first catalog in 1905. In leadership roles within the company until 1987, he helped to cement its reputation as one of America’s leading catalog marketers and change what originally was a budget-minded chain store-type catalog into an upscale “department store in print.”

His expertise in catalog marketing and business strategy has helped clients ranging from Walt Disney to Reader’s Digest to the Library of Congress.