Faculty & Staff Accolades: Winter/January 2017

Accolades celebrate the professional achievements of the faculty and staff in the College of Science. The following accolades were published for the month of January 2017.

Changwoo Ahn, Environmental Science and Policy, was awarded $20,000 by the National Science Foundation for his work on Symposium on Interdisciplinary Collaboration Among Ecological Engineering, EcoScience, and Eco-Art to Enhance Ecological Restoration Research.

Claudio Cioffi, Computational and Data Sciences, was invited to speak at the Summit on Social and Behavioral Sciences for National Security, held at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, under the sponsorship of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and to review its public report. He was also elected to the newly established University Research Advisory Committee, which will advise Mason administration on research issues and policies at the university level.

Lorelei Crerar, Biology, Chris Parsons, Environmental Science and Policy, and Elizabeth Freeman, School of Integrated Studies, along with a colleague from Howard University, co-published a paper titled “Illegal trade of marine mammal bone exposed: simple test identifies bones of “mermaid ivory” or Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas)” in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Paul Delamater, Geography and Geoinformation Science, was awarded $30,507 by Michigan State University for his work on CON/Health Policy Analysis and Mapping 2017.

Tim Delsole, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Climate.

Paul Dirmeyer, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, co-authored a commentary titled “Climate research must sharpen its view” in Nature Climate Change. He also published papers titled “Sensitivity of surface fluxes and atmospheric boundary layer properties to initial soil moisture variations in CFSv2” in Weather and Forecasting, and “Application of the land-atmosphere coupling paradigm to the operational Coupled Forecast System (CFSv2)” in the Journal of Hydrometerology. Dr. Dirmeyer also presented a paper he co-authored  with a current PhD student and postdoc titled “Extending the confrontation of weather and climate models from soil moisture to surface flux data” at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Harold Geller, Physics and Astronomy, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in order to provide support to the JPS Solar System Ambassador Program for education and public outreach as needed.

Nadine Kabbani, School of Systems Biology, was awarded $24,879 by the University of Virginia for her work on Investigation of Factors Affecting Nicotine Vapor Intake in Adolescent Males and Females.

Cing-Dao Kan, Physics and Astronomy, Center for Collision Safety and Analysis, was awarded $90,000 by Honda R&D Americas, Inc. for his work on Development of a FE model of NHTSA’s “half-face” OMDB.

Jason Kinser, Computational and Data Sciences, was appointed Acting Chair of the department.

James Kinter, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, was awarded $490,537 by Ligado Networks for his work on Demonstrating the Value of GOES-R Data in a Research and Education Framework.

Rainald Lohner, Physics and Astronomy, Fernando Mut, Bioengineering, Fernando Camelli, Physics and Astronomy, and colleagues co-authored a paper titled “Recent Advances in Scaling Up Complex Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulations” published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc. Dr. Lohner also co-authored a paper titled “Real-time micro-modelling of city evacuations” in the journal Computational Particle Mechanics.

Ron Mahabir, Anthony Stefanidis, Arie Croitoru, Geography and Geoinformation Science, Center for Geospatial Intelligence, Andrew Crooks,  Computational Data Science, Center for Geospatial Intelligence, and Peggy Agouris, College of Science, co-authored a paper on  “Authoritative and Volunteered Geographical Information in a Developing Country: A Comparative Case Study of Road Datasets in Nairobi, Kenya”, published in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information.

Chris Parsons, Environmental Science and Policy, authored a paper titled ““Advocacy” and “activism” are not dirty words – how activists can better help conservation scientists” published in Frontiers in Marine Science and co-authored “Tourists’ Perspectives on Dolphin-Watching in Bocas del Toro, Panama” published in Tourism in Marine Environments. Parsons was also promoted to “senior correspondent” of Southern Fried Science (http://www.southernfriedscience.com/)  – with over 5 million views, this is the most highly read blog on the topic of marine science and environmental issues in the world.

Esther Peters, Environmental Science and Policy, gave an invited presentation titled “Coral cut-ups: Forty years of investigating coral health” at the 2016 Concurrent Annual Meeting of the American College of Veterinary Pathologists and the American Society for Veterinary Clinical Pathology in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Emanuel Petricoin, School of Systems Biology, Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, was awarded $49,998 by Thomas Jefferson University for his work on Developing an algorithm for Molecular Tailored Therapy. He was also awarded $488,783 by the Gateway for Cancer Research for his work on Identification of Predictive Protein Pathway Activation Biomarkers for Neoadjuvant Breast Cancer Therapy Treatment from the ISPY2 TRIAL.

Ling Ren, Environmental Science and Policy, was awarded $97,650 by the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium for his work on Developing and Refining Phytoplankton Index of Biotic Integrity (P-IBI) for Barnegat Bay-Little Egg Harbor Estuary.

Shobita Satyapal, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $58,441 by NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center for her work on WISE Discovery of the Largest Sample of Obscured Dual AGNs: An XMM-Newton Follow.

Karen Sauer, Physics and Astronomy, along with her graduate student and other colleagues, published a paper entitled “Atomic Magnetometer Multisensor Array for rf Interference Mitigation and Unshielded Detection of Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance” in Physical Review Applied.

Anthony Stefanidis, Geography and Geoinformation Science and the Center for Geospatial Intelligence, gave an invited talk on “The Evolution of Geospatial Information” to the GeoPlatform Workshop at the US Department of Interior.

Mark Uhen, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, was appointed Associate Chair of the department.

Phil Yang, Geography and Geoinformation Science, Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, received on behalf of his team the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Partner of the Year award for the culmination of a decade or more of building success through ESIP interactions related to advancing cloud computing technologies and training through their collaborations with the Federation and the geo-information community.