Kudos: Excellence in Writing, Engineering, Computer Science, and More

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Honors go to Dartmouth’s Burkins, Chee, Kelly, Parker, Shipley, Vaze, and Vosoughi.

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Wrought Iron
Photo by Eli Burakian ’00
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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.

Melody Brown Burkins, Guarini ’95, ’98, the associate director for programs and research at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and an adjunct professor of environmental studies, has been appointed to the advisory board to the United Nation’s Global Assessment Report (GAR) for Disaster Risk Reduction. A biennial publication, the UN Global Assessment Report is the flagship report of the U.N., documenting worldwide efforts to reduce disaster risk, assess progress toward achieving targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and connect disaster risk reduction efforts to the Sustainable Development Goals. Burkins will serve in this U.N. advisory role as a representative of the International Science Council; she is an elected member of the council’s governing board.

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Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing Alexander Chee’s essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing—a prize awarded every other year by the Stanford Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation in literary fiction and nonfiction. Winners will be announced in late summer or early fall.

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Meredith Kelly, an associate professor of earth science, has been awarded a fellowship by the Geological Society of America. GSA Fellowship is an honor that is bestowed on the best of our profession,” writes the society on its website. “GSA members are elected to Fellowship in recognition of a sustained record of distinguished contributions to the geosciences and to the Geological Society of America.”

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Professor of engineering Geoffrey Parker, director of the Master of Engineering Management Program at Thayer School of Engineering, has been named a 2020 Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Fellow. Given for life, the fellowship recognizes POMS members who have made exceptional intellectual contributions to their profession and the society through their research and teaching.

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Jesse Weaver Shipley, the John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory and chair of the African and African American Studies Program, has been awarded the McMillan-Stewart Fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research for the 2020-2021 academic year. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, announced the 2020-2021 class of fellows. “We are happy to welcome one of our most distinguished and exciting cohort of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows,” said Gates. “We look forward to an extraordinary range of artistic and scholarly work next academic year.”

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Vikrant Vaze, the Stata Family Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering at Thayer School of Engineering, has been selected as one of 85 engineers who will participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2020 US Frontiers of Engineering (NAE) Symposium. In a press release, NAE stated that the engineers selected to take part in the event “are performing exceptional research and technical work in a variety of disciplines.”

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Assistant Professor of Computer Science Soroush Vosoughi has received an Amazon Research Awards. The grant program provides up to $80,000 in cash and $20,000 in AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating topics across 11 focus areas, according to the ARA program. There were 51 award recipients this year, representing 39 universities in 10 countries.

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