Kudos is an occasional column that recognizes Dartmouth faculty, students, and staff who have received awards or other honors. Did you or a colleague recently receive an award or honor? Please tell us about it: dartmouth.news@dartmouth.edu.

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Rita Temple Brooks, director of the Administration and Provost Finance Center and Geisel Finance Center, received the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officers (EACUBO) 2017 Distinguished Service Award. The award, presented at the annual meeting of the association in October, recognizes someone who “cultivates and embodies a strategic leadership mindset, and reflects EACUBO’s core values in fostering a sense of community and collegiality,” according to the organization’s website.

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Environmental studies adjunct professor Melody Brown Burkins, MA ’95, PhD ’98, associate director for programs and research at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, was part of the four-person U.S. delegation voting to merge the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to create a unified International Science Council. The new organization brings together a broad spectrum of social and natural scientists “to advocate the value and values of all science to society.” Ahead of the joint organizational conference in Taipei, Taiwan, Burkins played an important role in preparing for the vote as a member of the ICSU-ISSC Proposed Merger Strategy Working Group.

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The U.S. commuter mega-region research conducted by Dartmouth’s Garrett Nelson and the University of Sheffield’s Alasdair Rae has been chosen for the Royal Town Planning Institute’s top award. Nelson, a postdoctoral fellow, is a geographer who focuses on the history of landscape planning in the United States. His work explores how the different kinds of “unit” geographies in which planners operate—from neighborhoods and towns to metropolises and eco-regions—bear the traces of socially contested processes of inclusion and exclusion. The research Nelson and Rae did won the won the Sir Peter Hall Award for Wider Engagement in this year’s RTPI Awards for Research Excellence, which is the UK’s top planning research award. “The study illustrates the value of big data such as commuting data in helping to understand how places really work, which can be highly useful for policy makers and planners to make strategic decisions, from infrastructure and transport investment to how boundaries should be drawn up for elections,” wrote RTPI.