Awards, Honors, and Recognitions
Michelle Ephraim Wins Juniper Prize
English professor and celebrated Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim has been awarded the 2023 Juniper Literary Prize for Creative Nonfiction for GREEN WORLD: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare. The Juniper Prizes are a highly competitive and a well-regarded showcase of distinctive and fresh voices who share their work with a wide array of readers. GREEN WORLD is a story of how the boundaries between Ephraim’s life and those of Shakespeare’s characters seemed to vanish. The memoir unfolds as a sort of literary detective drama; its five-act structure creates a story within a story, in which her life uncannily starts to mirror that of the fictional Jewish daughter in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Dana Harmon Named Division III Athletic Director of the Year
Director of physical education, recreation, and athletics Dana Harmon recently received a 2022–23 Division III Cushman & Wakefield Athletic Director of the Year Award. The award honors athletic directors at all levels of collegiate competition for their contributions to student-athletes, campuses, and their surrounding communities. Winners were recognized in June at the 58th Annual National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics & Affiliates Convention at the World Center Marriott Resort in Orlando, Fla.
Jean King Selected for NIH Council of Councils
Peterson Family Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Jean King has been selected to serve on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils. A widely respected neuroscientist and researcher, King joins 26 other council members who advise the NIH director on policies and activities of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives. This includes making recommendations on research that represents important areas of emerging scientific opportunities, rising public health challenges, or knowledge gaps that deserve special emphasis or would otherwise benefit from strategic planning and coordination. Each council member also represents an institute or center that falls under the NIH. King has been appointed to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
Tian Guo Receives CAREER Award for AR Research
Researcher Tian Guo has been awarded a prestigious $657,776 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop novel software techniques that will improve the performance and privacy of mobile augmented reality (AR) systems, an increasingly popular technology that superimposes computer-generated images on a user’s view of the real world. Guo, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, will focus her five-year project on edge computing, which involves processing data close to its physical source. She will develop techniques to efficiently manage edge servers that are close to AR users whose mobile devices are interacting with the servers. The proposed techniques will be prototyped with commercially available edge servers, and the resulting software and hardware bundles will be deployed to support indoor AR use cases.