Faculty Recognition & Honors
Sloan Research Fellows
Jakoah Brgoch and Judy Wu (Chemistry) have been chosen as 2020 Sloan Research Fellows, an honor that recognizes outstanding early-career faculty selected for their potential to revolutionize their fields of study. The two have been honored for their work in fundamental chemistry. For 2020, 126 researchers in eight disciplines – ranging from chemistry to neuroscience, physics and economics – were selected for the honor.
Seamus Curran (Physics) will receive a 2020 Silicon Valley 50 Award. The 13th Annual Silicon Valley Global Awards, hosted by the Irish Technology Leadership Group, brings together the most entrepreneurial minds in the Silicon Valley and beyond to honor top Irish and Irish-American executives making a significant impact in their field. Fifty executives are selected and honored each year.
Roland Glowinski (Mathematics) has been selected by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics to receive the prestigious 2020 W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize. The award is presented for outstanding research in, or other contributions to, the broadly defined areas of differential equations and control theory. He will receive $10,000 and is invited to deliver a plenary lecture in July at the 2020 SIAM Annual Meeting in Toronto.
Key Publications
Ioannis Pavlidis (Computer Science) published in the journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analysis with colleagues from Texas A&M University, Northwestern University, and University of California, Merced. The work addresses the need to objectively assess academic performance in the process of rewarding academic merit, charting academic policy, and promoting science. The group developed an interface that harvests bibliographic and research funding data from online sources and addresses systematic biases in the collected data through nominal and normalized metrics. This research product has been turned into a functional web interface, Scholar Plot (scholarplot.org), which is already being used by academics around the country.
Zhifeng Ren (Physics, TcSUH) was part of collaboration of scientists from several universities that published findings in the journal Science on January 31. They found that isotopically pure cubic boron nitride has an ultrahigh thermal conductivity, 75% that of diamond. Using only boron-11 or boron-10 allows the crystal vibrations that carry heat to move more efficiently through the material. This property could be exploited for better regulating the temperature of high-power devices.