Faculty & Staff Accolades: October 2016

Accolades celebrate the professional achievements of the faculty and staff in the College of Science. The following accolades are for the month of October 2016.

Peggy Agouris, College of Science, was selected to serve on the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) Board of Advisors.

Ali Andalibi, College of Science, was awarded $60,798 by Inova Healthcare for Proteomics in Tumors and Development of Vector Based Therapeutics.

Andrew Crooks, Computational and Data Sciences, co-published the following papers, “Modeling the Emergence of Riots: A Geosimulation Approach, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems” and “User-Generated Big Data and Urban Morphology” in Built Environment.

Liping Di, Geography and Geoinformation Science and Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, was awarded $13,200 by Open GIS Consortium, Inc. for George Mason University’s participation in OGC ArcticSDP.

Paul Dirmeyer, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, was named Senior Leonardo Lecturer by the European Geophysical Union (EGU) and delivered the keynote address at the 8th EGU Leonardo Conference “From Evaporation to Precipitation: the Atmospheric Moisture Transport.” Dr. Dirmeyer along with his graduated PhD student published the following papers: Local and Remote Non-linearities due to Spatial Distribution of Amazon Deforestation in Journal of Geophysical Research, and Remote Tropical and Sub-tropical Responses to Amazon Deforestation in Climate Dynamics.

Thomas Duxbury, Physics and Astronomy, has been approved as the new “International Phobos/ Deimos Landing Site Working Group Chairman” by the space agencies of the US (NASA), Russia (Roscosmos), Europe (ESA) and Japan (JAXA) at the 7th Moscow Solar System Symposium. Phobos (“fear”) and Deimos (“terror”) are moons of Mars (the god of war) and will play important roles in international solar system exploration, leading to the human exploration of Mars.

Harold Geller, Physics and Astronomy, has been nominated for a 2017 George Mason University Teaching Excellence Award. These awards recognize outstanding faculty for their educational contributions to enhancing student learning at the university.

Cing-Dao Kan, Physics and Astronomy and Center for Collision, Safety and Analysis, was awarded $193,251 by the U.S. Department of Transportation for Structural Countermeasure/Research Program.

Christopher Kennedy, Environmental Science and Policy, was awarded $191,221 by Society for Conservation Biology for The Social Impacts of Marine Protected areas: A Comparative Study of the USA and Beyond.

Younsung Kim, Environmental Science and Policy, presented a paper entitled “Teaching Sustainability as an Interdisciplinary Subject: An Effective Model,” at the 2016 Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Conference on October 11, 2016. Also, in this presentation, she discussed a case study on George Mason University’s writing-intensive course “EVPP 337: Environmental Policymaking in Developing Countries.

Laura Lukes, Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence and Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences affiliate, was invited to give a presentation entitled “From Anecdote to Qualitative Data: Crucial role of reporting methodological choices and rationale” at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America. She also presented a poster on “EclipseMob: Engaging students and citizens in a global ionosphere/radio wave research experiment” during the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse (Phase 1-Infrastructure), and was a co-presenter of a poster on “Using geoscience databases to provide authentic research opportunities for undergraduates.”

Chris Parsons, Environmental Science and Policy, published a paper entitled “Why IUCN should replace ‘data deficient’ conservation status with a precautionary ‘assume threatened’ status – a cetacean case study” and co-authored the paper entitled “The Kraken in the Aquarium: questions that aren’t being asked but urgently need to be addressed in order to advance marine conservation”, both in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Emanuel Petricoin, Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, was awarded $68,112 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Department of Health and Human Service.

Jessica Rosenberg, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $123,336 by American Association for the Advancement and National Science Foundation for AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation.

Cynthia Smith, Environmental Science and Policy, was awarded $7,500 by the Fairfax County Water Authority for Visualizing Watershed Connections: The Inaugural Exhibit at Mason’s New Potomac Science Center.

Michael Summers, Physics and Astronomy, along with his New Horizons Team received the Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science from the Planetary Society.

Lee Talbot, Environmental Science and Policy, was presented with the Legacy Award of Defenders of Wildlife on September 29th at the Mayflower Hotel. The Legacy Award is the highest recognition given by Defenders, which is one of the largest and most effective environmental organizations. The award recognizes lifetime achievements in wildlife conservation.

Daniel Tong, Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, was awarded $367,145 by NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center for novel use of NASA data with emission data assimilation to support U.S. National Air Quality Forecasting Capability and WMO regional chemical reanalysis.

Chaowei Yang, Geography and Geoinformation Science and Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, was awarded $50,233 by National Administrative Surveying, Mapping for NASG Training Program, August 2016 and $76,718 for NASG Training, September 2016.

Erdal Yigit, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $36,816 by Bay Area Environmental Research Institute and NASA for Understanding the Role of Wave and Tides in Regulating Venus’ Highly Variable Upper Atmosphere Circulation (~70-170km).

Jie Zhang, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $104,876 by the Catholic University of America and National Aeronautics and Space Administration for Solar and Heliospheric CAN with CUA and NASA/GSFC, sub-task: Research on Coronal Mass Ejections.