Kudos October 2022
Celebrating Tufts Faculty and Staff
by: Sara Norberg
Kudos is a monthly submissions-based roundup celebrating university faculty and staff -- awards, honors, thought leadership, new arrivals, and more. Share your own great news or recognize a colleague at go.tufts.edu/kudos.
Welcome
Vernon Miller has been named the new director of Tufts’ Indigenous Center. Miller, a member of the Thunder Clan of the Omaha Nation of Nebraska and Iowa, has previously served as a business teacher in the Omaha Nation Public School, chair of the Omaha tribe Tribal Council, advisor to multiple federal agencies in the Obama administration, and director of Cornell University’s American and Indigenous Studies Program residence hall, the first such housing unit in the United States. Read more about Miller on Tufts Now.
Awards and Honors
Kwasi Ampene, visiting professor of music, was awarded the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Book Prize for Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana (Routledge 2022) for the best monograph on African music published in the past two years, by the Society for Ethnomusicology’s African Music Section.
Peter Gwynne, postdoctoral scholar in microbiology at Tufts School of Medicine, received an Emerging Leader Award by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation recipient and received a $100,000 grant for his project “Anti-lipid antibodies for the diagnosis of persistent Lyme disease.”
AS&E Faculty Promotions
Engineering faculty promoted to the rank of full professor:
- Usman Khan, electrical and computer engineering
- Doug Matson, mechanical engineering
- Mai Vu, electrical and computer engineering
Arts and Sciences faculty promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure:
- Andrea Acevedo, community health
- Tatiana Chudakova, anthropology
- Kareem Khubchandani, theatre, dance, and performance studies
- Robert Lemke Oliver, mathematics
- Paul Muentener, psychology
- Shameka Powell, education
- Rebecca Scheck, chemistry
- Jacob Stewart-Halevy, history of art and architecture
- Riccardo Strobino, classical studies
- Nate Ward, psychology
Arts and Sciences faculty promoted to full professor:
- Lorgia García-Peña, studies in race, colonialism, and diaspora
- Peter Love, physics and astronomy
- Keith Maddox, psychology
- Alisha Rankin, history
- Elizabeth Remick, political science
Arts and Sciences faculty promoted to senior lecturer:
- Mary Casey, child study and human development
- Theo Klimstra, child study and human development
- Brian Lilienthal, theatre, dance, and performance studies
- Ryan Redmond, education
- Andreola Rossi, classical studies
- Ninian Stein, environmental studies
- Jo Williams, theatre, dance, and performance studies
Arts and Sciences faculty promoted to distinguished senior lecturer:
- Linda Beardsley, education
- J. Matthew Harrington, classical studies
- Nancy Levy-Konesky, Romance studies
- David Proctor, history
- Claire Schub, Romance studies
- Jon Witten, urban and environmental policy and planning
Thought Leadership
Michael Beckley, associate professor of political science, joined NPR’s Fresh Air to discuss his new book, co-authored with Hal Brands, entitled Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China (Norton 2022).
Alex Blanchette, associate professor of anthropology and interim director of Environmental Studies, is quoted in a long-form story on pandemics and bird flu in the New Republic.
Julia Motl-Lowe, director of annual giving initiatives, was a special guest speaker in the recent 5Tool Productions webinar “Building a Strategy for a Successful Day of Giving.” Motl-Lowe discussed how an organization should prepare for its own giving days and how Tufts continues to build, grow, and pivot its annual Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign.
Todd Quinto, Robinson Professor of Mathematics in the School of Arts and Sciences, is co-organizing the special semester Tomography Across the Scales at the Jonathan Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics in Linz, Austria, running from October 3 to December 3. It will include more than 220 international mathematicians and scientists from the academy and industry, and will span the mathematics and science of electron microscopy (small scale), medical CT scanners, radar, sonar, seismic imaging, and astronomic observation (large scale).
Pearl T. Robinson, associate professor of political science, received a fellowship from the Africa-America Institute to support completion of a book manuscript for an intellectual biography of Ralph Bunche. Support for this project aligns with AAI’s Africa Illuminated Initiative, which aims to disseminate and broaden access to quality knowledge about Africa and the worldwide African Diaspora.
Alice Isabella Sullivan, assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, co-edited Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions, published this year in the series Sense, Matter and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Material and Literary Culture (De Gruyter). The volume stems from a two-day international symposium titled Eclecticism at the Edges: Medieval Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres (ca. 1300–1550) held at Princeton University in 2019. The book investigates the heritage and artistic production of Eastern Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art.
Find past Kudos (formerly known as People Notes). Submit your own great news or recognize a colleague at go.tufts.edu/kudos.