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August 2009
INSTITUTIONAL
The UH Child Care Center has earned accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council on Accreditation and School Improvement.
ALUMNI
Laurie Glaze received the Houston Woman Magazine Savvy Sister Award, which recognizes an outstanding woman who has made a significant career change, interesting business maneuver or an innovative change to her workplace.
FACULTY/STAFF
Lisa Alastuey, visiting assistant professor of health and human performance, was named University Health Educator of the Year by the Texas Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.
Pharmacy professor Rajender R. Aparasu has received a one-year, $98,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to evaluate the use of atypical antipsychotic agents in the elderly.
College of Technology faculty won the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Mechanical Engineering Division 2009 Best Poster Award at its annual conference and exposition. The poster illustrates the article “A Two-Year Common Template for Mechanical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Technology,” which appears in the 2009 ASEE proceedings. Enrique Barbieri, Raresh Pascali, Miguel Ramos and Dean William Fitzgibbon co-authored the article.
Margaret Cheung, assistant professor of physics, received a $219,000 National Science Foundation award to study the behavior of protein folding and interactions in a cell.
Eugene L. Chiappetta, professor of curriculum and instruction, received the Texas Chemical Council Excellence in Industry Education Award.
Rustin Crutchley, clinical assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy, recently became the first pharmacist to be accepted into the one-year STAR (Steps Toward Academic Research) Fellowship Program at the Texas Center for Health Disparities.
Zhu Han, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.) International Conference on Communications for his paper “Crystallized Rates Region of the Interference Channel via Correlated Equilibrium with Interference as Noise.”
Andrew S. Jackson, professor emeritus in the health and human performance department, was honored by the Texas Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine for his outstanding contributions to exercise science and sports medicine.
Lewis T. May, adjunct associate professor of architecture and senior vice president of PageSoutherlandPage, was a keynote speaker for Landscape Architecture and Resorts: A New Vision, an international planning and landscape architecture conference in Amman, Jordan. May’s presentation was “Exporting the Creative Process.” King Abdullah II of Jordan hosted and sponsored the conference.
Mark O’Riley, Sanjay Shiwprasad and Emmett Sullivan, employees in the environmental health and risk management department, co-authored the presentation “Minimizing Chemical Waste Without the Big Bang,” which was featured at the American Society of Safety Engineer’s annual conference. The presentation was about the department’s success in safely minimizing the amount of hazardous waste generated at UH during the past few years.
Tom Oldham, John H. Freeman Professor of Law, was appointed to the board of editors of the American Bar Association’s journal Family Law Quarterly.
Norma E. Olvera, associate professor in the department of health and human performance (HHP), was awarded a $75,000 grant from Salud America!, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to conduct research on reducing and preventing obesity among Latino youths.
Floyd W. Robinson, director of the Health Center, and Laura Moore, the center’s chief nurse, presented the teleseminar “H1N1 (swine fl u virus): Raise Awareness, Not Concern on Campuses” to the Council on Law in Higher Education.
Stephen Zamora, Leonard B. Rosenberg Professor of Law, has been appointed to the Association of American Law Schools Committee on Freedom and Academic Tenure.
STUDENTS
Three education students received several awards. S. Siddiqi was selected as a 2009 Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholar by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kelly Strohacker received the UH College of Education Graduate Student Research Award and placed second in the Texas Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine Student Manuscript Award Competition. Norah Vasen received the 2009 American Association for Health Education/American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance Outstanding Health Education Major of the Year Award.
INSTITUTIONAL
HoustonPBS received a My Source Community Impact Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The award recognizes the station’s commitment to education through its Ready to Learn Family Literacy workshops.
Online Degree World ranked the University of Houston No. 2 in its list of top 100 education tweeters. The list is posted at www.onlinedegreeworld. com/blog/2009/top-100-edu-tweeters/.
ALUMNI
Janice Nath (’85), associate professor of urban education at UH-Downtown, received the Robert B. Howsam Award from the Texas Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. This award honors individuals who have demonstrated leadership at the state and national levels and have made significant contributions to education.
Terry Rugeley (’92) received the Regents Distinguished Research Award from the University of Oklahoma, where he is the Presidential Professor of History.
Sara Stolt (’06), a graduate assistant at Michigan State University, received the prestigious Rasmussen Fellowship and the Topliff Scholarship in clarinet and will study and perform at the Centro di Studi Carlo della Giacoma in Todi, Italy, this summer.
FACULTY/STAFF
Geoffrey Brune and Donna Kacmar, associate professors of architecture, have been elevated to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows, one of the highest honors the organization can bestow upon a member.
Chris Burkhalter, associate athletics director for communications, has been selected to serve as a member of the NCAA Division I Softball Committee. Burkhalter will represent Conference USA from September 2009 to September 2013.
Sandra Guerra Thompson, Law Foundation Professor of Law and Criminal Justice Institute director, has been selected as one of the Hispanic Business Magazine’s 25 Elite Women for 2009. Martha Haun, associate professor of communication, co-authored the article “Saving Face in Meetings” published in the Parliamentary Journal.
Bob Heath, emeritus professor of communication, co-authored the book “Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations II,” which has been published recently.
Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, associate professor of economics, received the European Central Bank 2008 Wim Duisenberg Research Fellow. The honor recognizes leading economists in academia, central banks and top research institutions who are international experts in their field. Kalemli-Ozcan also was given the Marie Curie Reintegration Award from the European Commission. The award is designed to attract top-class researchers who work outside Europe to undertake research in the continent.
Nicolás Kanellos, Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies, was recently inducted as a member of Real Academia Hispanoamerica, the Spanish American Royal Academy for Literature, Arts and Sciences.
Sanja Korman, lecturer in health and human performance, won the title of the National Dance Association 2008 K-12 National Dance Educator of the Year.
Juan Madera, assistant professor of hotel and restaurant management, is the author of the paper “Gender and Letters of Recommendation: Agentic and Communal Differences.” The Journal of Applied Psychology has accepted the paper for publication.
Peter Norton, associate professor of psychology and director of the Anxiety Disorder Clinic, was named the recipient of the 2009 American Psychological Foundation Theodore Blau Early Career Award. This honor is presented to clinical psychologists for their accomplishments within the practice and carries a $2,000 prize.
Michael Olivas, William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law and director of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance, received Stetson University College of Law inaugural William A. Kaplin Award for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy Scholarship. Olivas’ book “Colored Men and Hombres Aqui: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican American Lawyering” was made into a film by the Public Broadcasting System.
G. Thomas Schanding Jr., assistant professor of educational psychology, was selected to participate in the 2009 School Psychology Research Collaboration Conference as an Early Career Scholar.
Jonathan Schwartz, associate professor of educational psychology, received the 2007 Outstanding Contribution Award given by the Counseling Psychologist. Schwartz was co-author of the winning article, “Guidelines on Prevention Practice, Research, Training, and Social Advocacy for Psychologists.”
Pradeep Sharma, Bill D. Cook Chair Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2009 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
STUDENTS
Stephanie Ace, political science major, is the 2008 recipient of the Women Professionals in Government Beverly Kaufman Scholarship.
Clarissa Hinojosa, doctoral history candidate, won the History Essay Prize from the Western Conference on British Studies for the best paper given at its annual conference. Her essay is titled “Justice Overdue: An Historically-Based Critical Reinterpretation of Alice Overdo in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.”
Rehan Momin, senior electrical engineering major, was among a group of students to win the “Extreme Engineering Challenge” competition at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers national conference.
Natalie Nguyen, education major, was named Scholar of the Week by the National Society of Collegiate Scholars for the week of March 16. The organization is an honor society for freshmen and sophomores with 233 chapters nationwide and in Puerto Rico.
ALUMNI
Jill Finke, 07, received the 2008 Leadership Award for the Western Group Ambulatory Surgery Division of HCA Health Care.
FACULTY/STAFF
William Fitzgibbon, College of Technology dean, has been named a visiting scholar at the University of Delhi Lady Shri Ram College, one of India’s highest-ranked colleges in undergraduate education in the humanities, social sciences and mathematics. The visiting scholar program is sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences Foundation.
Professor Tyler Priest, director of Global Studies at Bauer College, received the Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article Outside Environmental History for 2007. The award is one of four granted each year by the American Society for Environmental History and recognizes Priest’s article, "Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico," as the best article on environmental history published in a scholarly journal other than ASEH's Environmental History.
STUDENTS
Business student Tom Chang was one of three recipients of the 2008 Ascend/Houston Society of CPAs. He also received the 2008 Accounting Excellence Award given by the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants.
Business student Dan Neely won the Government and Nonprofit Section 2008 Outstanding Dissertation Award of the American Accounting Association for his dissertation, "The Effectiveness of Governance Regulation in the Tax-Exempt Sector: Evidence from the Nonprofit Integrity Act of 2004."
Babu John Mariadoss received the 2008 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the American Marketing Association Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group for best dissertation in the field of selling and sales management.
The Hispanic Business Student Association chapter at Bauer College was named the 2008 National Hispanic Business Association Leadership Chapter of the Year.