November 30, 2006

Honors

Zdenek P. Bazant, McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been elected as a Foreign Member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Italian National Academy. The induction ceremony will take place in Rome in June 2007.

The Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei was founded in 1603 and is the oldest honorific scientific academy in the world. Seated in Rome across the river from the Vatican in Palazzo Corsini, the academy counts Galileo among its earliest members. The academy is limited to 184 members and approximately 40 foreign members. Of foreign members, Bazant is one of only two engineers.

Bazant discovered the non-statistical (energetic) size effect on the strength structures consisting of brittle heterogeneous materials such as concrete, fiber composites, tough ceramics and rock or sea ice, and is known as a world leader in research on scaling in solid mechanics.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Engineering Academy of Czech Republic and the Academia di Scienze e Lettere (Milan).

Linda Broadbelt, professor of chemical and biological engineering, has received a Fulbright Award for 2006-07.

During her year as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, she will work at Imperial College London with Professor Donna Blackmond and her research group to study asymmetric catalysis using amino acids as organocatalysts. Broadbelt will be applying computational quantum chemical methods to help unravel mechanisms of asymmetric catalytic reactions that are currently being studied experimentally in Professor Blackmond’s laboratory.

The study of asymmetric reactions has implications for the pharmaceutical industry, where molecules with a given “handedness” for targeted therapeutic applications are sought, and also addresses fundamental questions about the chemical origin of life on Earth and our homochirality.

Broadbelt joined Northwestern in 1994 and was appointed the Donald and June Brewer Junior Professor from 1994-96. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of multiscale modeling, complex kinetics modeling, environmental catalysis, novel biochemical pathways and polymerization/depolymerization kinetics.

Aaron Cassidy, lecturer in composition at the School of Music, received a 2006-07 ASCAPLUS Award — Concert Music Division.

The award was presented by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to reflect the organization’s continuing commitment to assist and encourage ASCAP composers. ASCAP is a membership association of more than 260,000 U.S. composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers of every kind of music.

Awards are granted by an independent panel and are based upon the unique prestige value of each writer’s catalog of original compositions, as well as recent performances.

Cassidy is a young composer of experimental music. His works are gaining widespread exposure with performances in the United States, Mexico, Austria, the Netherlands, Croatia, England, France, Sweden, Germany and Australia.

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Chad A. Mirkin, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, has made In-Cites’ list of the top 10 most-cited chemists in the world. He is currently 9th out of 6,438 chemists in all fields.

The full list can be viewed at http://in-cites.com/top/2006/

fourth06-che.html. In-Cites is a Web site that includes listings of highly cited and so-called hot papers across 22 broad fields and also provides commentary and analysis on some of the most influential scientific discoveries.

Mirkin is world-renowned for his development of medical diagnostic systems based upon nanomaterials. In addition, he is the inventor and chief developer of Dip-Pen Nanolithography, a groundbreaking process for building nanoscale structures by directly printing them onto surfaces. Mirkin is the founder of two Chicago-based companies, Nanosphere and NanoInk.

He is the author or coauthor of more than 280 refereed publications and 310 patents (53 issued). Mirkin’s awards include the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award; the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences; the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award; Discover 2000 Innovation of the Year Award; the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology; and the Leo Hendrick Baekeland Award.

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John Rudnicki, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering, has received the 2006 Maurice A. Biot Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

He was cited for his fundamental contributions to the mechanics of porous media and its applications to rock mechanics and geophysics.

Rudnicki’s conducts theoretical research on inelastic behavior, failure and fracture of geomaterials. He also focuses on the effects of coupling between deformation and pore fluid diffusion with applications to deformation of the Earth’s crust, mechanics of earthquakes, storage and recovery of energy, disposal of toxic wastes and sequestration of carbon dioxide.

The author of numerous articles and book chapters on poromechanics, Rudnicki currently is a member of the advisory board of the International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics. He previously served as associate editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics and the Journal of Geophysical Research.

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Alexander G. Weheliye, associate professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University, has received the 2006 Modern Language Association (MLA) William Sanders Scarborough Prize for “Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity” (Duke University Press, 2005).

The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture published the previous year. Scarborough was the first African American member of the MLA. The award carries a $1,000 cash prize.

Weheliye teaches African American and Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture, critical theory, cultural studies and popular culture.

Currently he is working on two interrelated projects. The first, Technologies of Humanity, concerns the vexed role of the human in Western modernity as it pertains to Afro-Diasporic culture over the last 150 years. The second, Modernity Hesitant: The Poetics of W.E.B. DuBois and Walter Benjamin, charts the various literary and philosophical styles in the oeuvre of these two intellectuals.