January 25, 2007

Honors

Fischer selected in fellowship program

Brodwyn Fischer, assistant professor of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is one of 60 scholars of humanities and humanities-related social sciences nationwide to be selected in the American Council of Learned Societies’ (ACLS) fellowship program.

Fischer’s award is for her study “Cities After Slavery: Abolition, Property, and Urban Migration in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, 1880-1960.”

Fischer specializes in modern Brazil and Latin America, with an emphasis on histories of law, urban transformation and social inequality.

She has received grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon Foundation.

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Northwestern, Art Institute collaboration honored

A research collaboration involving two chemists from Northwestern and a conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago has received the silver prize from the L’Oréal Art and Science Foundation in France. The L’Oréal Art and Science of Color Prize is awarded to people who have made distinguished contributions to the creative meeting of science and art through color.

The collaborators are Richard VanDuyne, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Alyson Whitney, a graduate student working with VanDuyne; and Francesca Casadio, Andrew W. Mellon Conservation Scientist at the Art Institute.

The team has been working on new methods to identify organic red pigments used in particular pieces of art, such as textiles. This knowledge is important because the attributes of a particular pigment affect the conditions needed to preserve a piece, give insight into the artist’s methods and provide another method to verify a piece’s authenticity.

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Honig receives research award

Michael Honig, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received a Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award recognizes Honig’s accomplishments in research and teaching.

Honig plans to conduct research at the Technical University of Munich from May to July 2007, returning for a similar visit in 2008. He will work with colleagues there and at the Fraunhofer Institute at the Technical University of Berlin on projects related to signal processing and resource sharing methods for wireless communications and networks.

Honig is known for his work on adaptive filtering and interference mitigation and avoidance in wireless systems.

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Belytschko receives honorary doctorate

Ted Belytschko, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received an honorary doctorate from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, an engineering university in France. This is his third honorary doctorate.

Belytschko’s research is in computational methods for modeling the behavior of solids, with particular emphasis on failure and fracture. He has developed new meshfree methods and the extended finite element method for modeling arbitrary crack growth without remeshing. Belytschko has applied his methods to a variety of crack growth problems, both static and dynamic.

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Radulescu receives poetry prize

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, lecturer of French and Italian at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has received the grand prize for free verse poetry in the 2006 International French Language Poetry Competition. She accepted the prize in Paris last month.

Radulescu was born in Romania where she earned a Ph.D. in French and began her literary career. She has published poetry in a variety of literary magazines in Romania, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and United States.