Kudos
Beth Bachmann, assistant professor of English, has won the Poetry Society of America’s 2011 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress.
Chris Barbic, founder of Houston, Texas-based YES College Preparatory Schools and a Vanderbilt alumnus, has been appointed by Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam to lead the new Achievement School District that will take over five underperforming schools in Memphis and Chattanooga.
Alan Bentley has been named assistant vice chancellor of technology transfer and intellectual property development and will head the Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization at Vanderbilt. He formerly was director of
commercialization for Cleveland Clinic Innovations with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
Robert Dittus, the Albert and Bernard Werthan Professor of Medicine, has been named associate vice chancellor for public health and health care and senior associate dean for population health sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He will retain his roles as director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Medicine and Public Health; the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center; and the Quality Scholars Fellowship Program.
Sam Feist, a Vanderbilt alumnus and Vanderbilt Student Media Hall of Fame
inductee, has been promoted to Washington, D.C., bureau chief and senior vice president for CNN.
Mark Jarman, Centennial Professor of English and director of the Program in Creative Writing, has published the poems “Oblivion” in the Chronicle for Higher Education and “Passed On” in The Atlantic.
Vaughan F.R. Jones has been named distinguished professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt beginning this fall. Jones, who is coming from the University of California-Berkeley, holds the Fields Medal, awarded once every four years to mathematicians age 40 and under for outstanding discoveries in mathematics. He received the Fields Medal in 1990 for his discovery called the Jones polynomial, an unexpected link between the mathematical study of knots and statistical mechanics. Jones will join the math
department’s Center for Noncommutative Geometry and Operator Algebras.
Cindy Kam, associate professor of political science, recently spoke at the University of Michigan on the state of political science. Kam, a Michigan alumna, was among the invited speakers for the Miller Converse Lecture, a featured event of the centennial celebration of Michigan’s Department of Political Science.
Jean Kang, a 2011 graduate, has won the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award from the Department of Art. The award, worth $25,000, will allow her a year of work, research and travel culminating in a solo show at Vanderbilt in 2012. Will Rigby, a 2011 graduate, won the Merit Award worth $10,000.
Leslie Labruto, a 2011 graduate, has been elected a Young Alumni Trustee to the Vanderbilt Board of Trust. She will serve a four-year term.
Mark Lazarus, president of NBC Sports Cable Group and a Vanderbilt alumnus, has been
named chairman of the NBC Sports Group.
Craig M. Lewis, the Madison S. Wigginton professor of management in finance at Owen Graduate School of Management, has been appointed the chief economist of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the new director of the SEC’s Division of Risk, Strategy and Financial Innovation, created in September 2009 to help identify market risks and trends in the wake of the financial crisis. Lewis’ position with the SEC is a two-year appointment, during which time he will be on sabbatical from Vanderbilt.
Torin Monahan, associate professor of human and organizational development, has been awarded the Surveillance Studies Book Prize for 2011 for his Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, an analysis and critique of how surveillance is being positioned as a means to advance security.
The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt has been recognized among the nation’s “Best Children’s Hospitals” by U.S. News & World Report. Among the specialties ranked, Pediatric Urology was No. 5 and Neonatology was No. 11.
Betty Price, deputy vice chancellor for finance and controller, will retire from Vanderbilt at the end of June. Price has been at the university for 24 years, during which time she oversaw Vanderbilt’s financial accounting, planning and reporting operations.
Sean Seymore, associate professor of law and of chemistry, has been appointed a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Associate Professor to the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Spring 2012.
Daniel Swinton, assistant dean of students and director of the Office of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity, has been elected president of the Association of Student Conduct Administration, an organization of about 1,700 student conduct professionals representing more than 700 colleges and universities around the country. He will serve as president until February 2012 and as past-president the following year.
Vanderbilt has won the 2011 Energy Management Achievement Award from the Middle Tennessee chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers and the Center for Energy Efficiency at Middle Tennessee State University. The award recognizes recent energy efficiency improvements to Rand Hall.
Vanderbilt has been named to the 2010 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The designation recognizes a university’s support of volunteering, service learning and civic engagement.
The Vanderbilt Aerospace Club won the Payload Design Award for the second straight year at the NASA University Student Launch Initiative, a yearlong program that culminated in a rocket launch event near Huntsville, Ala.
Vanderbilt Athletics topped the Southeastern Conference in the NCAA’s annual Academic Progress Report. Ten of Vanderbilt’s varsity sports were named Public Recognition Award winners, which accounted for nearly 44 percent of the 23 total SEC programs honored. The Academic Progress Report measures the progress of student-athletes toward graduation over a four-year period.
Sharon Weiss, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has been accepted to the 2012-13 class of the Defense Science Study Group, which introduces selected scientists and engineering professors to the challenges facing national security and encourages them to apply their talents either as government advisers or in their own research.
David Wood, Centennial Professor of Philosophy, has installed two of his sculptures, Awakening and Reflection, at Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art. Wood’s “Double Heliotrope” exhibit runs through Oct. 21.