Kudos July 2026
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.
Fadi Azra, student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and his film, Adam, won the Outstanding Creative Achievement from SMFA at Tufts. It also won Best Animated Film at the Arpa International Film Festival, Best Animated Short Film at the Indo Dubai International Film Festival, Official Selection at the Buffalo International Film Festival, and Official Selection at the Egyptian American Film Festival. Adam is a stop-motion short film about memory, displacement, and the fear of losing where we belong. The film follows a character who wakes to a face without eyes and a self he no longer recognizes, confronting the erosion of memory and identity.
Maria Cazzato, A26 (BFA), and Soph Paris, A28 (BFA), were accepted into the Penland Summer Workshop, which offers intensive craft workshops in a wide range of media.
Julian Chow, Ph.D. student at the School of Engineering, received a Croucher Foundation Scholarship for Doctoral Research, a prestigious fellowship for citizens of Hong Kong.
Sergio Fantini, professor, Milod Kazerounian, assistant teaching professor, Madeleine Oudin, associate professor, and Matthew Panzer, professor, all at the School of Engineering, received AS&E Faculty Awards recognizing exceptional contributions to teaching, research, and service.
Brent Forester, professor and endowed chair of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, received the American Psychiatric Association’s 2026 Jack Weinberg Award. This prestigious honor recognizes Forester’s leadership in the assessment and treatment of older adults with mental health challenges, his commitment to training future geriatric mental health clinicians, and his contributions to advancing dementia research. Forester accepted the award at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting, where colleagues from Tufts Medical Center and the School of Medicine also showcased their work through research poster presentations.
An Hà, A26 (BFA), received the 2026 Artist Award Grant in Visual Art from the St. Botolph Foundation.
Julian X. Han, E26, Tarkan Ayata, E26, and Jacob Merritt, E26, won the 2026 Honors Thesis Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding undergraduate theses. Visit the School of Engineering website to learn more about their work.
Eitan Hersh, professor of political science, is the recipient of Heterodox Academy’s 2026 Open Inquiry Award for Leadership. Heterodox Academy is a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization committed to building cultures of open inquiry on campuses. Hersh is receiving the 2026 Leadership Award from Heterodox Academy for his effective leadership in launching and directing the Tufts Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education and building durable institutional structures for cross-ideological dialogue.
Henry Hoopes, A26 (BFA), was accepted into the Watershed Ceramics summer residency program, which brings together cohorts of artists interested in living and working in community.
Saeed Hosein, A27 (MFA), was awarded an Ox-Bow Fellowship.
Nisha Iyer, Tiampo Family Professor at the School of Engineering, and her lab received a Craig H. Neilsen Foundation SCIRTS (spinal cord injury research on the translations spectrum) grant for developing new stem cell therapies for spinal cord injury.
Keren Ladin, associate professor in the Department of Community Health and assistant professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, co-authored the paper “Identifying Adaptation Needs of a Decision Aid for Older Latino Adults with Advanced CKD: A Qualitative Study,” which was awarded the 2026 National Kidney Foundation Mission Award by the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.
Maryann Makosiej, V26, was named a 2026 College Volunteer of the Year by Worcester Magazine.
Elise Meyer, Ph.D. student at the School of Engineering, won a Student Presentation Award at the Seismological Society of America annual meeting for her presentation on how to better map seismology throughout the eastern half of the United States. https://engineering.tufts.edu/news-events/news/advancing-understanding-seismology-eastern-us
Anna Miller, senior multimedia producer in the Department of University Communications and Marketing, has won an Emmy for her 2025 feature about True Becker, a School of Engineering Class of 2025 graduate who was the music director for the Beelzebubs, a member of the Boston Celtics Dunk Team, and a former Ninja Warrior participant.
John Mulvihill, A26, student videographer, and the Department of Athletic Communications received 11 honors from the College Sports Communicators Creative & Digital Design Contest.
Freeden Blume Oeur, associate professor of sociology, was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship for 2026–2027. At Radcliffe, Oeur will work on a manuscript that restores the dream of a book on Black childhood that W.E.B. Du Bois himself envisioned but never completed.
Maurice Parent, professor of the practice in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and producing artistic director of Front Porch Arts Collective, won the Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director (Small Theater) for the Front Porch Arts Collective’s play The Mountaintop. The Mountaintop also won three additional awards: Outstanding Play (Small Theater); Outstanding Lead Performance in a Play (Small Theater); and Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play (Small Theater). Eliot Norton Awards are presented by the Boston Theater Critics Association.
Lily Siddall, head women’s rowing coach, was named National Coach of the Year, and her staff earned the Collegiate Rowing Association National Coaching Staff of the Year after another historic season.
Mikey Sims, A26 (BFA), and Ilsiia Shakirova, A26 (BFA), were accepted into the Ox-Bow summer workshop. Ox-Bow brings artists together from around the world to live and work in community with one another—expanding their knowledge, skills, and network in ways that will impact them and the communities they contribute to for years to come.
Vera Su, A28 (BFA), was accepted into the Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Program, an intensive six-week undergraduate summer residency program for rising seniors.
Rose Tinkjian, A26, earned National Athlete of the Year by the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association.
Gregory Wolfus, V98, founding director of Tufts at Tech Community Veterinary Clinic and associate clinical professor in the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, received the Trailblazers in Animal Welfare Award from the Humane World for Animals, a global nonprofit that focuses on animal welfare. Read more about this honor on the Cummings School website.
Linda Wrijil, supervisor of the Diagnostic Histology Laboratory at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, received the Norma King Award as the 2026 MaSH Histotechnologist of the Year. The Norma King Award honors a histotechnologist who exemplifies outstanding mentorship, teamwork, and dedication within the workplace, recognizing individuals who make a lasting impact on both their colleagues and the profession.
Liana R. Woskie, assistant professor in the Department of Community Health, was awarded Best of Conference for Research in Women’s Health at the national U.S. health policy conference, AcademyHealth, for her project Cross-Border Spillover of U.S. Abortion Restrictions on Misoprostol Retail Pharmaceutical Markets, along with colleagues at Harvard and Brown.
The Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, a major research institute for which Tufts is a key partner, has received renewed support from the National Science Foundation for another five years, increasing annual funding from $4 million to $4.98 million.
A team of civil and environmental engineering students came in first place in a competition tasking teams to design an MBTA stop addressing current needs in public transportation infrastructure. Read more about the competition on the School of Engineering website.
The Tufts chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers received an award for Student Organization of the Year. This award is presented annually to an outstanding group that has made significant contributions to the Tufts community.
Women’s rowing and men’s lacrosse teams, for the third year in a row, each won NCAA national titles.
Lindsey Filowitz, AG26 (MFA), was featured in Issue 16 of the Boston Art Review.
Shafiqul Islam, professor at the School of Engineering, and his team analyzed the hydrology and social narratives surrounding a flood in Bangladesh to help inform effective solutions to flooding and other environmental disasters.
David Kaplan, Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering, teamed up with other researchers from Tufts, Imperial College London, and the University of Michigan to develop a significantly improved way of transforming silk into solid materials—one that preserves and enhances the natural strength of silk fibers. Read more about this research on Tufts Now.
Soyoung Lee, a third-year Ph.D. student at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, is studying how diet shapes metabolic health through protein networks. Read more about her research on Tufts Now.
Cheryl London, associate dean for research and Anne Engen and Dusty Professor in Comparative Oncology at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and other Tufts veterinarian-scientists have joined the Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab at Break Through Cancer, a foundation empowering researchers. The effort will be the largest unified study to find cures for osteosarcoma in people and pets.
Jamie Maguire, the Kenneth and JoAnn G. Wellner Professor of Neuroscience at the School of Medicine, and Marcus Weera, assistant professor of psychology at the School of Arts and Sciences, put together a special issue of the journal Psychopharmacology to honor Klaus Miczek, a distinguished scientist, teacher, and mentor at Tufts for decades who held an appointment at both schools.
Sergei Mirkin, White Family Chair, and Simone Ummarino, a scientist in his lab, authored a paper entitled “RNAs anchoring replication complex control initiation and firing of DNA replication” in Nature Communications with colleagues from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. It establishes a new mechanism for initiating replication in human cells, finding that RNAs transcribed near replication initiation sites anchor the replication recognition factor ORC1 and the histone variant H2A.Z, thereby facilitating origin firing.
Jessica Saab, production artist in the Department of University Communications and Marketing, was accepted into a juried exhibition at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston’s SoWA. The show, Cutting Edge, is all about collage. Her piece, “Fossil Fuels,” can be seen in the online portion of the show until August 2.
Farshid Vahedifard, Louis Berger Chair and professor, and Amirali Asadian, Ph.D. student, both at the School of Engineering, led a study showing that extreme wildfire statistics require distinct modeling approaches that can more accurately estimate wildfire size. In addition, Vahedifard and Babak Moaveni, professor of civil and environmental engineering, received a National Science Foundation grant to study how to better monitor model levees—important structures that are key to flood protection.
The Food is Medicine Institute at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy has introduced a new tool kit that gives clinicians and health system leaders practical guidance on implementing programs like medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions. It covers everything from program design to clinical integration to measuring impact.
Clinicians at Tufts at Tech Community Veterinary Clinic and Henry and Lois Foster Hospital for Small Animals at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine teamed up to help expand access to veterinary care and promote antimicrobial stewardship. The group created a technical tutorial video published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. The tutorial provides detailed instructions for conducting a validated low-cost technique that is regularly practiced at Tufts at Tech.
Megan Evans, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, has been appointed the inaugural Linda and Jeffrey Moslow Professor of Women’s Health and Menopause at the School of Medicine.
Matt Panzer, professor and dean of research in the School of Engineering, was named the inaugural E Ink Professor of Engineering.