Kudos December 2025

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. 

Ayse Asatekin, professor of chemical and biological engineering, was awarded the Separations Division FRI/Neil Yeoman Innovation Award by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Separations Division for her research in the field of separations. The award honors one outstanding separations researcher each year in memory of Neil Yeoman, a founding member of both the award’s sponsor (Fractionation Research, Inc.) and the AIChE Separations Division.  

Christina Economos, professor and dean of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, has been named a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. An international leader in research into children’s nutrition, health, and obesity prevention, Economos is one of 100 new members, including 90 from the United States and 10 international members. Read more about the honor on Tufts Now.  

Patrick Erickson, a postdoctoral student, was recently honored with an award at the Biomarkers of Aging Conference for his poster presentation. Erickson works in the lab of Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush Professor.  

Julie Flaherty, deputy editorial director in the Department of University Communications and Marketing, had two feature stories recognized by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) with Best of District I Awards for 2025. Flaherty’s features (“When a Teammate Saves Your Life” and “College in Prison Changed Them—Now They Want to Change Minds”) included photography from Anna Miller, senior multimedia producer, and Alonso Nichols, chief of photography. CASE is the international professional development organization for advancement and communications professionals; District I includes New England and the eastern Canadian provinces.   

Lisa Freeman, professor of clinical sciences at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, is one of eight semi-finalists for the inaugural Canine Health Discovery of the Year Award, presented by the American Kennel Club Canine Health Foundation. The winner of the award will be announced in mid-December.  

William Harvey, associate professor at the School of Medicine, was named president of the American College of Rheumatology.  Donald Heflin, executive director of the Edward R. Murrow Center and senior fellow of diplomatic practice at The Fletcher School, was named a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.  

Matthew Hipps, part-time lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, was awarded an Early Development grant through the LEF Foundation’s 2025 Moving Image Fund. The grant will support his current documentary film project exploring the historic and contemporary overlap of queer public spaces and film exhibition sites as venues for queer world-building and transgressive expression in Greater Boston.  

Anna Kijas, assistant director of digital scholarship and the Lilly Music Library, will receive the 2025 Karl Preusker Medal in December at the Berlin State Library. The award, given by Germany’s national library association, the Bibliothek Information Deutschland, is considered one of the highest honors in German librarianship. Kijas will be honored for her work as a co-founder of SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online), which brings together more than 1,500 international volunteers to provide web archiving and digitization support to cultural heritage organizations across Ukraine to act as a digital safe haven for cultural memory.  

Misha Kilmer, William Walker Professor of Mathematics, was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2026. AMS members designated as fellows of the AMS have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.  

Peter Love, professor of physics and astronomy, was named a fellow of the American Physical Society, a distinction that is awarded to a select group of physicists annually in recognition of their contributions to the field.  

Adam Lowenstein, assistant professor at the School of Dental Medicine, was named among Incisal Edge's 40 Under 40 Top Dentists. This list celebrates the “most innovative, most interesting, best young dentists” in America.  

Susan Napier, professor of international literary and cultural studies, was honored by the government of Japan with “The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon” in recognition of her outstanding contributions to Japanese literature and culture and for her work in establishing the field of anime studies in the United States.  

Rocco DiRico, executive director of the Office of Government and Community Relations, received the Distinguished Service to the Somerville Chamber Award at the Somerville Chamber of Commerce’s 79th Annual Dinner and Powderhouse Awards.   

Paul Simmonds, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, was selected as a SCALE Capital Program awardee by the Healey-Driscoll Administration and the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub. The funding will drive workforce and technology development in AI hardware, nanotechnology, and quantum computing.  

With the support of the Tufts community, Tufts University Police Department and Tufts Public Safety raised $1,640 for the Joe Andruzzi Foundation through its Pink Patch Program during the month of October in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.   

Three Tufts faculty have been named to a ranking of the world’s most highly cited researchers: Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and dean emeritus at the Friedman School, Chunmei Li, research assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and Renata Micha, adjunct associate professor at the Friedman School. The researchers in the Clarivate 2025 list have a significant impact on the research community as judged by the rate their work is cited by their peers, according to Clarivate, an information and analytics firm focused on research. Read more about this honor on Tufts Now. 

Qais Assali, professor of the practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, presented “The Four Non-Western Aliens: Ikebana Visual Syntax through Data Visualization and Graphing”—a MUSE Awarded Project—at the 2025 Connecticut Art Education Association Conference.  

Merve Baksi, postdoctoral scholar at the School of Engineering, Zachary Kranefeld, EG25, Kareena Guness, Pan Menasuta, Jimmy Rushing, and Basil Vanderbie, all Ph.D. students at the School of Engineering, showcased their work at AVS71, a leading international symposium on vacuum science and materials innovation.   

Maria Blanco, professor of psychiatry and associate dean for faculty development at the School of Medicine, led a group of faculty members and students who authored a paper exploring use and attitudes toward AI among the school’s faculty, staff, and students based on a needs-assessment survey the team distributed. The research team used this information to draft a roadmap for integrating the rapidly changing technology into the school’s curriculum. Read more about this research on Tufts Now.  

Erin Coughlan de Perez, research director and associate professor at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, along with Feinstein International Center colleagues, authored a report titled “Landscape of Anticipatory Action for Health in a Changing Climate.” Read more about the report on Tufts Now.  

Hugh Gallagher, W. Anthony Mann, and Jeremy Wolcott, all professors of physics and astronomy, authored research titled “Joint neutrino oscillation analysis from the T2K and NOvA experiments” in Nature. Read more about the findings on Tufts Now.   

Rachel Gately, associate clinical professor in the Department of Ambulatory Medicine and Theriogenology at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and longtime client Judith Hooper, owner of Grass Hill Farm in Connecticut, collaborated to produce the first purebred Herdwick sheep born in the United States.  

Meera Gatlin, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health, Rachel Gately, associate clinical professor in the Department of Ambulatory Medicine and Theriogenology, both at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Eleanor Kharasch, V25, MG24, and colleagues from University of Massachusetts Amherst authored “Efficacy of fenbendazole in small ruminants on Southern New England farms” in the journal Veterinary Parasitology: Regional Studies and Reports.  

Michael Halassa, professor of neuroscience at the School of Medicine, and his colleagues authored two studies in the journal Nature Communications: “Thalamic regulation of reinforcement learning strategies across prefrontal-striatal networks” and “The neural basis for uncertainty processing in hierarchical decision making.” Read more about this research on Tufts Now. Halassa also led and published the study “Preliminary real-world predictors of response to muscarinic targeting in psychosis.” The research was published in the journal Nature Mental Health. Read more about this research on Tufts Now.   

Jonathan Lamontagne, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Jacob Wessel, EG25, along with colleagues from other institutions, authored “Regional coordination can alleviate the cost burden of a low-carbon electricity system” in the journal Nature Communications.  

Susan Landeau, professor of cybersecurity and policy, provided insights on the 2024 Salt Typhoon cyberattack during a recent Electronic Privacy Information Center webinar.  

Mike Mandel, part-time lecturer, and Chantal Zakari, professor of the practice, both at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, showed their new work Accidental Evidence at Kingston Gallery in Boston in November. Their recently published book Accidental Evidence was reviewed in Lenscratch and Collector Daily.  

Alberto Medina, communications manager, Sara Suzuki, senior researcher, and Ruby Belle Booth, researcher, all at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), displayed the impact that young voters played in key elections in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, in their latest publication titled “Young Voters Power Mamdani Victory, Shape Key 2025 Elections.”  

Kendall Reiss, professor of the practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, is featured in a chapter of the new book, Brilliance: Jewelry Art and Fashion. In the chapter, Reiss and the authors discuss the importance of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s jewelry collection to students at SMFA. A copy will be available at the SMFA Library, and the book is published in conjunction with an exhibition on view now, Beyond Brilliance, Jewelry Highlights from the Collection. The book’s author, Emily Stoehrer, will gather cohorts of students from SMFA and other schools for a Jewelry Study Day at the MFA in February 2026, which will include a panel discussion with Boston-area professional artists, including Reiss.  

Deborah Schildkraut, professor of political science, and Jeffrey Berry, professor emeritus of political science, both at the School of Arts and Sciences, and James Glaser, dean emeritus and political science affiliate at The Fletcher School, authored a book entitled Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives & Their Routine Political Lives. The book explores Americans’ views of several manifestations of “everyday democracy,” which the authors define as the attitudes, behaviors, and processes that people experience in daily life and their routine considerations of politics and community.  

Jennifer Schmidt, professor of the practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, gave an artist lecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna in Bologna, Italy, in November.   

Benjamin Stern, assistant professor at the School of Medicine, collaborated with engineers at Arizona State University on a recent paper published in Nature Communications, titled “Bridging known and unknown dynamics by transformer-based machine-learning inference from sparse observations.” Read more about this research and Stern’s work to use artificial intelligence in medical education to help both faculty and students on Tufts Now.  

Malcolm Turvey, the Sol Gittleman Professor of the Department of History of Art and Architecture, authored a book titled Film, Art, and the Limits of Science: In Defence of Humanistic Explanation.   

Farshid Vahedifard, professor and Louis Berger Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Mohammed Azhar, Ph.D. student at the School of Engineering, led the team that authored “Comprehensive portfolio of adaptation measures to safeguard against evolving flood risks in a changing climate” in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Read more about this research on Tufts Now.   

A research team from the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and the School of Medicine authored the study “Candida albicans colonization modulates murine ethanol consumption and behavioral responses through elevation of serum prostaglandin E2 and impact on the striatal dopamine system” in the journal mBio. Those on the research team are: Carol Kumamoto, professor of molecular biology and microbiology at the School of Medicine; Andrew Day, GBS25, who conducted the study while a Ph.D. student in the molecular microbiology program at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; Jamie Maguire, professor at the School of Medicine; Emma Hayes, research technician at the School of Medicine; Katrina Blandino, a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; Alyssa DiLeo, GBS22, and Jeyra Perez-Lozada, formerly of the School of Medicine. Read more about the research on Tufts Now.   

Scientists from the Jean Mayer Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, as well as the University of Washington and other institutions, authored research titled “Protein Catabolites as Blood-Based Biomarkers of Aging Physiology: Findings from the Dog Aging Project” in the journal Aging Cell. Read more about the research on Tufts Now.

Elena N. Naumova, was named the inaugural Barry J. Rosenbaum Professor of Data Science at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. The establishment of this new endowed professorship in data science is made possible by the generosity of Barry Rosenbaum, A60, advisor emeritus, and Renée Underwood.