October 2006

Kudos!

Recognition of the awards, honors, and recent publications of the GW faculty and staff

Acknowledgements:

John Banzhaf, professor of law, was featured on the NBC-TV program “Dateline,” on which he discussed the use of legal action against the American obesity epidemic. His views on the topic of racial profiling appeared in a variety of media, including CNBC’s “On the Money,” the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Carolyn Chase has been appointed director, Information Systems and Services, with oversight over a consolidated support area that includes key customer-facing ISS units, while Charlie Spann, director, Information Systems and Services, now has oversight over a combined Desktop Support area.

Jonathan Chaves, professor of Chinese, published Cloud Gate Song: The Verse of Tang Poet Zhang Ji, Floating World Editions. This is the first book on the poet Zhang Ji (766-830) in any Western language and also the first to present the work of a classical Chinese poet in translations which match the rhymes of the original poems. Chaves also led the East Asian literature sessions for George Mason University’s “Cultural Encounters,” a series of National Endowment for the Humanities-funded workshops on the literatures of the world.

Zsuzsa Csergo, assistant professor of political science and coordinator of the Women’s Leadership Program in U.S. and International Politics, has been awarded the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European Union University in Florence, Italy, for the fall semester 2006.

Eric Drown, assistant professor of the University Writing Program, is changing the field of science fiction studies with two articles in peer-reviewed journals this fall. His “‘A Finer and Fairer Future’: Commodifying Wage Earners in American Pulp Science Fiction” appears in the September 2006 issue of Endeavour (UK), a history of science quarterly, while “Business Girls and Beset Men in Pulp Science Fiction and Science Fiction Fandom” is the lead article in Femspec 7.1.

Jane E. Ferguson, laboratory coordinator for introductory biology, has been named a National Academies Education Fellow in the Life Sciences for this past academic year based on her highly competitive selection to and enthusiastic participation in the 2005 National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology.

Charles A. Garris Jr., professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, received the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for the invention of a pressure exchanging ejector that pioneers a novel energy transfer process.

Marcus Jetter, program manager of facilities planning, presented “IDrawings.com — Development, Implementation, Expansion, and Maintenance:
A 5-Year Retrospective” at the National Collegiate Facilities Management Technology Conference.

Dennis W. Johnson, professor of political management, published “First Hurdles: The Evolution of the Pre-Primary and Primary Stages of American Presidential Elections,” a chapter in Winning Elections with Political Marketing, edited by Philip John Davies and Bruce I. Newman.

Dane Kennedy, Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs, co-edited, with Durba Ghosh, Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World.

Ivy Kennelly, assistant professor of sociology, was awarded a $7,000 grant from the American Sociological Association and National Science Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline in support of her research project “Modesty as an Expression of Structural Advantage.”

Chris M. Kormis is now assistant vice president for University Relations. Kormis is a 16-year veteran of GW, including eight years as director of GW publications and, most recently, five years as executive director of University Relations.

Davis L.C. Lee, associate professor of Chinese and international affairs, published Readings in Chinese Newspapers (2005–2006), his fourth textbook for third-year college students.

Frank Lee, associate professor of physics, co-authored “Glueball Spectrum and Matrix Elements on Anisotropic Lattices” in the Physical Review D. The main prediction of the work was adopted in the 2006 Review of Particle Physics, the most authoritative source in particle physics.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, University Professor of Islamic Studies, gave a keynote address at the conference “Religion and the Contemporary World” in August. Part of a series on religion and democracy, the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California and the Graduate Theological Union co-convened the conference on religious pluralism and the intersection of faith and society in the United States and the world. In addition, he published Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy in June.

Kathryn Newcomer, director of the School of Public Policy and Public Administration, recently published “How Does Program Performance Assessment Affect Program Management in the Federal Government?” in Public Performance and Management Review. She facilitated a session on “Incorporating Practice in MPP Curricula” at an American Association of Policy Analysis and Management meeting in June and is delivering the presidential address at the fall meeting of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA), where she will assume the presidency of NASPAA. She also was recently appointed to the Task Force on National Service.

Ryan Watkins, assistant professor of educational technology, published Performance by Design: The Systematic Selection, Design, and Development of Performance Technologies.

Ronald Weitzer, professor of sociology, and Steven Tuch, professor of sociology, have published Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform.

Hal Wolman, director of the GW Institute of Public Policy and professor of political science, public policy and public administration, and international affairs, has been appointed a nonresident senior fellow by the Brookings Institution.

Jason Zara, assistant professor of engineering and applied science, received the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Early Career Translational Research Award in Biomedical Engineering. The award will fund Zara’s research on the use of microfabricated optical coherence tomography imaging probes to detect precancerous and cancerous conditions in vivo without surgery.

Kudos is a recognition of the awards, honors, and recent publications of the GW faculty and staff. To submit information for Kudos, e-mail ByGeorge! at bygeorge@gwu.edu.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu

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