January 26, 2006

Faculty honors

Ronald J. Allen, the John Henry Wigmore Professor of Law, has been honored for the significance of his research with a fellowship from the China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, and the Procedural Law Research Center. 

Allen’s appointment is the first of what will be a number of fellowships offered to scholars with the expectation that they will work with faculty at the university and the Procedural Law Research Center as well as other institutions throughout China to advance the development of the Chinese legal system and to promote international scientific cooperation.

“Professor Allen’s work on the law of evidence and the nature of juridical proof and the implications of that work for the structure of legal systems has proved to be of international significance, influencing the development of the law not only in the United States, but in such disparate societies as the People’s Republic of China and New Zealand,” wrote Xianming Xu, president of China University of Political Science and Law, in a letter to Allen.

Tracy Davis, Ethel M. Barber Professor of Theatre and professor of English and theatre, is the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar’s Prize from The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).

In awarding the prize, the ASTR, which provides an organization and public voice for theatre scholars and promotes the theatre as a field for serious scholarly study, called Davis’s scholarly work “a model for the profession.”

Davis is the author of “Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture” and “The Economic History of the British Stage, 1800 -1914,” among other books. She is the author of dozens of articles on a wide variety of topics, including Victorian theatre, 20th century popular culture, gender studies and dramatic criticism.

Her forthcoming book explores the staging of preparations for nuclear war by populations within British, Canadian and American communities as they coordinate civil defense exercises affecting neighborhoods, cities and nations on local and international scales. Titled “Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense,” it will be published in 2006 by Duke University Press.

Karen Tranberg Hansen, professor of anthropology, has been awarded a fellowship for 2005-06 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. She is working on a book, “Youth Matters: Crafting Urban Space in Zambia.”

The Wilson Center awards 20 to 25 residential fellowships annually to individuals with outstanding project proposals in the social sciences and humanities in a broad range of national or international issues. Topics relate to key public policy issues or provide the historical and cultural framework to illuminate them.

Hansen’s project is an outgrowth of a long-term collaborative, interdisciplinary research project about youth and the city for which she has worked in Lusaka, Zambia. The project examines how “youth” is constructed in different cultures and which abilities and visions it encompasses. It compares how different social, cultural and economic factors are affecting young people’s possibilities to acquire the kinds of skills that are required to become social adults.

Joseph L. Schofer, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been named William L. Patterson Distinguished Professor of Transportation.

Schofer’s research focuses on urban transportation policy planning, traveler behavior and market research, intelligent transportation systems, and pedestrian and motor vehicle safety. Schofer also is interested in traffic calming and strategies to promote more and safer walking and biking.

Schofer is a member of the Transportation Research Board and the Institute of Transportation Engineers and a life member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He also is a member of the advisory panel for the U.S. Department of Transportation Travel Model Improvement Program.

Marciano Siniscalchi, associate professor of economics, has been named Household International Corporation Research Professor in Economics.

Siniscalchi's research focuses on game theory, decision theory and information economics, with special emphasis on dynamic models.

He is the recipient of two National Science Foundation grants: the Parental Guidance and Supervised Learning grant and the Studies in the Foundations of Game and Auction Theory grant.

He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, and the Bepress Journals of Theoretical Economics.

His current areas of research include decision theory, learning-theoretic analysis of parenting and child development, epistemic foundations of strategic analysis in dynamic games, and efficiency and retrading under adverse selection.

Samuel I. Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science, Chemistry, and Medicine and director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine, has been named by Scientific American magazine as a Research Leader within the 2005 Scientific American 50.

During the past decade, Stupp’s research has focused on self-assembly, the strategy used by biology to create highly ordered defect-free structures. In the work cited by Scientific American, Stupp used self-assembly to develop organic materials with electronic properties that could be of interest in future solar energy devices. 

Stupp is a recognized leader in the rapidly advancing fields of nanoscience and self-assembly. His strategies for developing nanostructured materials involve the synthesis of molecules programmed for self-assembly into functional materials of interest in widely varying fields ranging from electronics to regenerative medicine.

Michael R. Wasielewski, professor of chemistry, has been awarded the 2006 James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry from the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society.

The award honors Wasielewski’s contributions to understanding electron transfer reactions in problems ranging from biomimetic models for the photosynthetic reaction center to fundamental approaches to organic molecular electronics.

His research interests include photo-induced electron transfer and charge transport in organic molecules and materials; self-assembly of nanoscale materials; magnetic properties of radical ion pairs; ultra-fast optical and magnetic resonance techniques; materials for molecule-based opto-electronics and spintronics; and the biophysics of proteins involved in the primary processes of photosynthesis.