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Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature has sold a new project

From the October 1 Publisher's Weekly:
Carla Kaplan, Northeastern professor and author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, has sold a new project, a biography of Jessica Mitford. Harper's Gail Winston, who is also publishing Kaplan's forthcoming Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, bought world English rights from Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams. Kaplan will be working with the cooperation of the Mitford family, and the book will draw on unpublished documents.

Northeastern University Professor William Hancock Receives Funding From the National Cancer Institute to Study the Glycobiology of Cancer

Northeastern University is one of seven institutions selected by The National Cancer Institute (NCI) to receive funding as part of a new $15.5 million, five-year initiative to discover, develop, and clinically validate cancer biomarkers by targeting the carbohydrate (glycan) part of a molecule. The purpose of this initiative is to aid in the understanding of cancer risk and detection. Northeastern’s research team is led by William Hancock, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Bradstreet Chair of the Barnett Institute, and will focus its work on breast cancer.

Read the complete article (09/04/07)

Northeastern University Professor Darien Wood Elected Spokesperson of DZero Experiment at Fermilab

Northeastern University Associate Professor of Physics Darien Wood assumes the position of Spokesperson for the DZero Experiment, located at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL. The DZero Experiment explores the fundamental nature of matter and intends to answer the question, “What is the Universe made of?” The Experiment uses the world's premier high-energy accelerator, the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab, and DZero scientists sift through the debris of proton–antiproton collisions produced at the highest available energies and search for subatomic clues that reveal the character of the building blocks of the universe.

Read the complete article (08/17/07)

Associate Professor of English Beth Britt is the Recipient of the 2007 Excellence in Teaching Award

Professor Beth Britt is the recipient of the 2007 Excellence in Teaching Award at Northeastern. She is one of only two faculty members in the University so honored this year. Professor Britt, whose teaching and research interests include rhetorical criticism, rhetoric of law, rhetoric of inquiry, and ethnographic theory and methods, will be recognized in a ceremony at Commencement in May, and a brief biography will appear in NU's Commencement booklet.

Sociology and Anthropology Professor Kathrin Zippel is the Co-Winner of the Victoria Schuck Award

Kathrin Zippel's book, The Politics of Sexual Harrassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany, published by Cambridge University Press is the co-winner of the Victoria Schuck Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book published the previous year on women and politics.

Read more about the award

Art Professor Hailed As One of "Super 8" in Massachusetts Design World.

Visual Arts professor Tom Starr was profiled in a recent article in the Boston Globe that celebrated the extraordinary accomplishments of select individuals in the Massachusetts design community. Starr's profile specifically focused on the social mission that is prevalent in much of his work. His most recent project, "Remembering Boston's Children 1980-2005," a mobile memorial to those who have lost their lives to city violence in the form of a working city bus, has created greater awareness of the violence that plagues Boston streets.

Read the complete article (12/7/06)

Professor's Robolobster on Display at Smithsonian

Biology professor Joe Ayers' robolobster, a 7-lb., 2-ft.-long robot modeled after a real lobster and designed to crawl along the coast and underwater, scoping out hidden mines, will be included in the "Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006" series exhibition, to be held Dec. 8, 2006 through July 29, 2007, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. RoboLobster is is one of the first robots ever built to use artificial muscle, which allows it to move more easily on its own. Biomimetic robots are capable, due to their size and infrastructure, of leveraging the capabilities, proven in animals for dealing with real-world environments.

Read the full release (11/6/06)

Music Professor's Composition Premieres

A new mixed media composition by Music Professor Dennis Miller had its Boston premiere on Sunday, December 3rd as part of the Sonic Circuits International Festival of New Music. Circles and Rounds (2006) was shown at a concert at the Fenway Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music. The work, which combines Miller's original music and animation, has been presented 18 times at venues in 7 countries since its world premiere in May of this year. It also received the top award for a video work at the Art of the Digital show in San Diego this fall.

Physics Faculty Member Inducted as American Physical Society Fellow

Professor Stephen Reucroft was recently selected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in recognition of "his leadership and outstanding contributions to the precision determination of fundamental quantities in particle physics." To achieve the rank of Fellow within the APS, a member must be nominated by two other members of the Society, at which point the application is reviewed by a Fellowship Committee that submits annually to the APS Executive Officer a list of nominees recommended for such election. The number of recommended nominees in each year does not exceed one-half percent of the then current membership of the Society. Recommended nominees are presented to Council at the Elections Meeting, and a majority vote of the Councilors present results in election.

Read the full release (11/20/06)
Full List of 2006 Fellow Selections

Time Magazine Cites "Arts" in CAS as Attractive to Student Prospects

In a special August 21 issue dedicated to addressing the question, "What are the most important criteria to consider when evaluating prospective colleges and universities, the arts programs in the College of Arts & Sciences were identified as particularly attractive to students interested in study in this area. The quote, on page 4 of the article reads, "Among the artistically inclined, the Rhode Island School of Design has always been pre-eminent, but schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emerson College and Northeastern University are now attracting kids specifically for their arts curriculums."

Read the full article, "Who Needs Harvard?" in Time (August 21, 2006)

Biology Professor Recognized As One of Nation's Top Young Scientists

Assistant Professor of Biology Rebeca Rosengaus was honored at the White House on July 26, as one of the nation's top young scientists. Dr. Rosengaus was recognized with a PECASE Award (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers), the nation's highest honor for professionals at the beginning of their research careers. Select federal agencies make nominations of researchers whose works demonstrates exceptional long-term promise. Professor Rosengaus was among a select group of 20 NSF (National Science Foundation) Career awardees to be recognized. The award is given to less than 1% of those who apply for the NSF Career Award. Founded in 1996, recipients receive up to five years of funding, allowing them to continue with their research.

Formal Press Releases Announcing the Award Recipients:
From the National Science Foundation
From the White House (.pdf)

Chemistry Professor Honored with Prestigious Dreyfus Foundation Award

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Penny Beuning has been selected as the recipient of a 2006 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award. This is a prestigious award with only 12 given across the country to candidates who demonstrate the potential to produce an independent body of scientific scholarship of outstanding quality and will make significant contributions to overall education in the chemical sciences. Other recipients include faculty from schools including Columbia, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Purdue, Texas A&M, University of Chicago, University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota.

About the Dreyfus Foundation and the New Faculty Award program

Physics Professor's Research Featured on Cover of Nature Materials

In a short treatise "On the Six-Cornered Snowflake" published in 1611, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler foresaw the existence of atoms by recognizing that snowflakes could be explained by the hexagonal close packing of spheres. Snowflakes and more generally dendritic crystals grown from a melt or a vapor, do indeed often grow along fixed crystal axes determined by the regular packing of atoms on crystal lattices, much like Kepler guessed. Professor Alain Karma and collaborators have used computer simulations and experiments to demonstrate that dendritic crystals can also be induced to grow in arbitrary directions by chemically altering the anisotropy of surface tension, which delicately controls the growth of these intricate branched patterns. The results provide a significant contribution to the fundamental understanding of dendritic growth and offer new possibilities to control dendritic microstructures that control the mechanical strength and corrosion resistance of a wide range of metallic alloys used for automotive parts, turbine blades, and many other applications. T. Haxhimali, A. Karma, F. Gonzales and M. Rappaz, “Orientation Selection in Dendritic Evolution,” Nature Materials 5, 660-664 (2006).

Full text of the article

International Affairs Alumna Receives Fulbright Scholarship to China for Research in Women's Studies

Jennifer Noveck, International Affairs ’04, was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to China for 2006-2007. Noveck will travel to China and continue her work in Women’s Studies and International Affairs through her research on how rapid economic development and the reemergence of traditional cultural beliefs are currently affecting Chinese women’s employment opportunities. She will also be researching the social policies that have been created to combat cultural values and that have been difficult to change. Jennifer is one of 1,200 U.S. citizens who have been granted Fulbright scholarships this year.

*Read Fulbright Scholars Program Press Release
*Information on the Fulbright Scholars Program

History Majors Continue Department's Proud Tradition of Excellence in Undergraduate Research

There is an explosion of undergrad research being conducted in the History department, continuing in the tradition of Jared McBride, History '04, who conducted research in the Soviet Archives on a village in the Western Ukraine that was destroyed by the Nazis during WW II. Jared's research uncovered the story behind the destruction.

In April, undergraduate history majors Ilya Luvish ‘06 and Alice Saunders ’07 participated in the Phi Alpha Theta New England conference on historical research at Yale University. Phi Alpha Theta is the History Honors society, requiring a B+ average or above for admission in the final two years of undergraduate study. Luvish worked for seven months in Russian and Hebrew archival materials in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem, the world’s premiere research collection for Jewish History studying anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe after World War II. Saunders research focuses on Vietnam veterans’ opposition to the Vietnam War. Students from regional colleges and universities including Yale University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the University of Michigan, among others participated. Papers were reviewed by panels of experts, judged on the basis of research, analysis, style, and presentation. Both Northeastern students ranked in the top six of all participants at the conference and Saunders received the award for “Best Paper” in the conference. More recently, Jeremy Parker ’09 and Caitlin Rogan ’09 were selected to receive Provost’s Undergraduate Research Grants in May. Parker is currently in Japan conducting research for his project, “Social Movements in Postwar Japan,” while Rogan’s project “The Historical Antecedents of the Crisis of Muslim Violence in Contemporary France” took her to Paris, France in April and May to conduct research for her project.

Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature Appointed

The English Department recently announced the appointment of Professor Carla Kaplan to the Davis Distinguished Professorship in American literature. Professor Kaplan is the author of the widely acclaimed Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002), listed as a “Best of 2002” book by the New York Times Book Review, and of The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (1996). Professor Kaplan was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (for 2007-2008), a New York Public Library Cullman Center fellowship (for 2006-2007), and a W. E. B. DuBois Institute Research Fellowship (for 2007-2008) to complete work on her current book project, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2009.

Chemistry Professor Awarded First Komen Grant at NU

Professor Robert Hanson has been awarded funding from the Susan G. Komen Cancer Foundation in the amount of $236,250 for the period 2006-2008 for his grant proposal entitled “Synthesis of Signal Transduction Inhibitor-Steroid Antiestrogen Hydrids Using Click Chemistry”. Komen Foundation grants are highly competitive, and this is the first proposal to be funded at NU. Additionally, Professor Hanson recently received the honor of being named Matthews Distinguished University Professor.

Music Professor Awarded Prestigious Rome Prize

Assistant Professor Hilary Poriss, a newly hired faculty member who will join the Department beginning with the coming academic year, was recently awarded the prestigious Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in the area of Modern Italian Studies, by the American Academy in Rome for her paper, Arias, Authorship, and the Prima Donna. Awardees are provided with a stipend, a study or studio, and room and board for a period of 6 months to 2 years.

Model Arab League Team Receives Highest Honors in Washington D.C.

Our Nationals Model Arab League team had an amazing time in D.C. Representing Algeria, they received 12 Awards: 8 Outstanding Delegate Awards, 2 Honorable Mention Delegate Awards, The Crisis Delegation Award, and Outstanding Delegation Award for the entire conference. Of a possible 24 points towards Best Delegation, our team earned 22 points. The next highest scoring team earned 7. No team in the history of the conference has posted this large of a sweep.