CLAS Accomplishments - 2006

Awards, Honors, and Accomplishments of CLAS Faculty and Departments.

To submit an entry, please use the CLAS Accomplishment Submission Form.

African American Studies

William L. Conwill

William L. Conwill (CLAS/African American Studies & COE/Counselor Education) presented “Multicultural Competencies: African Americans,” at the National Conference of the American Counseling Association in Detroit, Michigan (March 21-25). The 90-minute workshop, sponsored by the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD), addressed training, research and treatment related to intersectional (gender, race, class and nation), developmental and inter-group identity issues. Conwill (Vice President for African American Concerns) also participated in directing the “AMCD Town Hall Meeting: Special Interest Groups Collaborate on Issues of Multicultural Importance.” AMCD is a division of the American Counseling Association. Its mission is preparing global leadership, research, training and development for multicultural counseling professionals with a focus on racial and ethnic issues. Conwill also received the AMCD Meritorious Service Award and the AMCD Exemplary Diversity Leadership Award.

Anthropology

Michael Moseley

Distinguished Prof. Michael Moseley was profiled in the March 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol 103, No. 13, pp. 4805-4807).

Anthony Oliver-Smith

Doctor Oliver Smith was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award winners for the 2006-2007 academic year. The award promotes doctoral studies and recognizes excellence in doctoral student mentoring. The four recipients of this years' award received a $3000 cash award plus $1000 to support their graduate students.

Anthropology and African American Studies

Faye V. Harrison

Faye V. Harrison was invited to present a keynote lecture at a joint conference sponsored by the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the Pan-African Anthropological Association, and Anthropology Southern Africa. Her lecture was entitled "Remapping the Postcolonial along the U.S. Southern Transborder." The conference, held at the University of Cape Town, Dec. 3-8, 2006, was organized around the theme: "Transcending Postcolonial Conditions: Toward Alternative Modernities."

Dr. Harrison also co-organized and co-chaired a four-part session entitled "Negotiating Postcolonial Conditions as Gendered Praxis: Ethnographic and Theoretical Perspectives."

At the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society at the University of Mississippi, Dr. Harrison, a joint professor in anthropology and African American studies, was honored with the society's first Zora Neale Hurston Award for Mentoring, Service, and Scholarship. The award is given to one who uses anthropological tools for critically engaging and negotiating cultural diversity in ethically and socially responsible ways.

Anthropology and Zoology

Connie J. Mulligan

Science published an article (PDF) by Connie Mulligan of Anthropology, Mike Miyamoto of Zoology, and Anthropology graduate student Andrew Kitchen. The comment confirms the utility of mitochondrial DNA for reconstruction of past population history, at least in mammals such as humans, primates and other "charismatic" animals of conservation interest. This is important because mitochondrial Eve, our first common female ancestor, was based on this genomic system.

The comment was in response to a meta-analysis that found no correlation between mitochondrial diversity and population size when comparing across large numbers of animal species. This is an important rebuttal because the original authors appear to be incorrect when it comes to mammals (they did not publish a response to the comment).

Astronomy

Rafael Guzman

Associate Professor Rafael Guzman has been named Deputy Principal Investigator of a major international project funded by a $6.5 million grant from the Spanish government's CONSOLIDER program. The grant will fund various initiatives on technology, research and education associated to the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the world's largest optical/infrared telescope being constructed in the Canary Islands by UF, Spain and Mexico.

Guzman is currently the UF representative and vice president of the GTC Steering Committee. He is responsible for all major decisions regarding the construction, operation and scientific utilization of the $170 million observatory. As part of his responsibilities with CONSOLIDER, Guzman will lead the “Galaxies Origins and Young Assembly” (GOYA) survey in a study of how galaxies formed at the very beginning of the universe.

He will be responsible for coordinating and directing the efforts of 40 astronomers in five different countries, including several faculty members, post-doctorate fellows and graduate students at UF.

Guzman will also lead an international program in higher education promoting UF as a center of excellence in learning and research around the world. The cornerstone of this program will be the creation of the International School of Scientific Instrumentation (ISSI), also funded in part by the CONSOLIDER grant. Beginning during the 2007-2008 school year, this school will be open to astronomers and engineers worldwide, with particular emphasis on the United States, Spain and Latin America.

Botany

Doug and Pam Soltis

Doug and Pam Soltis, along with co-authors Peter Endress (University of Zurich) and Mark Chase (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England), received the 2005 Stebbins Medal from the International Association of Plant Taxonomists for their book, "Phylogeny and Evolution of Angiosperms," published in 2005 by Sinauer Associates. The Stebbins Medal, named in honor of G. Ledyard Stebbins, is awarded for an outstanding publication in plant systematics and plant evolution.

Doug and Pam Soltis, along with David Dilcher (FLMNH) and William Stern (Prof Emeritus, Botany), each received a Centennial Award from the Botanical Society of America. The Botanical Society of America, founded in 1906, established the "Centennial Award" to acknowledge and honor outstanding service to the plant sciences and the Society.

Doug and Pam Soltis jointly received the Asa Gray Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. The Asa Gray Award, the highest honor given by the ASPT, was established to recognize outstanding scientists for their contributions to systematics research.

Pam Soltis began her term as President-Elect of the Botanical Society of America at the close of the meeting. Pam served as Secretary from 1997-2000, and Doug Soltis was President from 1999-2001.

Chemistry

George Christou

George Christou was recently a keynote speaker at the international conference “Frontiers of Quantum Nanoscience” held January 22-26 in Noosa, Queensland, Australia. The conference was co-sponsored by the Pacific Institute of Theoretical Physics of Vancouver, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Australian Centre for Quantum Computer Technology.

Classics

Victoria Pagán

Victoria Pagán presented the paper "Toward a Definition of Conspiracy Theory in Ancient Rome" at the international conference "Dark Powers: Conspiracies in History and Fiction" at the University of Konstanz, Germany on May 12, 2006. The paper was reviewed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Lisa Edmonds

Dr. Lisa Edmonds was recently awarded a 5,000 research grant from the American Speech Language and Hearing Association called the The New Investigator Research Award. This award will support her project entitled " The effect of verb network strengthening treatment (VNeST) on crosslinguistic generalization of sentence production abilities in Spanish/English bilingual aphasia."

Dr. Pat Kricos

Pat Kricos was elected President Elect of the Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology and will begin her term in January, 2008.

Jay Sheehan and Nicole Kreisma

Jay Sheehan and Nicole Kreisman are recipients of the 2007 American Academy of Audiology Student Research Award. Each year the AAA makes only 5 of the highly competitive Student Research awards to graduate students.

Jay Sheehan received the AAA Student Research Award for his doctoral dissertation entitled "Outcomes of FM System Usage in Places of
Worship." (Dissertation advisor: Scott Griffths).

Nicole Kreisman, now a faculty member at Towson University, received the AAA Student Research Award for her doctoral dissertation entitled"Psychosocial Impact of APD: Implications for Audiologists." (Dissertation advisors: Carl Crandell and James W. Hall III).

English

Andrew Gordon, Norman Holland

Andrew Gordon and Norman Holland organized the 23rd International Conference on Literature and Psychology in Helsinki, Finland, June 28-July 3, co-sponsored by the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts (UF) and the University of Helsinki Department of Education. The Vice-Rector and the Dean of the Faculty of Behavioral Sciences of the University of Helsinki greeted the conferees. There were 61 papers by speakers from Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Serbia, Greece, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Israel,Taiwan, Malaysia, Canada, and the United States. Andrew Gordon spoke on "Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Trauma Culture" and Norman Holland spoke on "Literature as Happiness: The Critic as Mammal." Other participants from the University of Florida were Bertram Wyatt Brown (Emeritus, History) and Anne Wyatt-Brown (Emerita, Linguistics). The next International Conference on Literature and Psychology will take place July 4-9, 2007 at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. For information, contact Andrew Gordon at agordon@ufl.edu.

Norman Holland

Norman Holland presented Literature and Happiness: The Critic as Mammal at the 23rd International Conference on Literature and Psychology in Helsinki, Finland on June 28, 2006.

Geological Sciences

Joseph G. Meert

Joseph G. Meert presented Snowball Earth at the Florida Association of Science Teachers (FAST) conference in Gainesville, Florida on October 13, 2006.

Germanic and Slavic Studies

Nora Alter

Nora Alter was elected Vice-President of the Women in German, a prestigious national and international academic organization of women scholars in German studies. After serving as Vice-President, Nora Alter is next in line to become the next President of WIG. Women in German provides a "democratic forum for all people interested in feminist approaches to German literature and culture or in the intersection of gender with other categories of analysis such as sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity."

Political Science

Lawrence Dodd

Lawrence Dodd gave the commencement address on May 13th, 2006 at his undergraduate alma mater, Midwestern State University (BA, 1968) in Wichita Falls, Texas. Dodd's speech, "Learning to Learn: Liberal Arts and the Preparation for Life", illustrated the transformative effects of liberal arts education and the preparation for life that it provides, even at (or particularly at) a small community college on the vast, windy, hot high plains of Northwest Texas.

Dr. Dodd was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award winners for the 2006-2007 academic year. The award promotes doctoral studies and recognizes excellence in doctoral student mentoring. The four recipients of this years' award received a $3000 cash award plus $1000 to support their graduate students.

Michael T. Heaney

Michael T. Heaney (Assistant Professor of Political Science) and Jason Kassel (Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science) have been named Congressional Fellows by the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the 2007-08 academic year. Michael and Jason will spend the year working on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The APSA Congressional Fellowship was held in 1974-75 by Professor Lawrence C. Dodd, the Manning J. Dauer Eminent Scholar in Political Science. The fellowship has also been held by Ph.D. graduates of the Department of Political Science, including Marian Currinder (2003-04), Elizabeth Oldmixon (2001-02), and Fiona Wright (2001-2002). The University of Florida's consistent record of placing faculty and students into this prestigous program testifies to the strength of the University in the study of Congress and American political institutions more generally.

Psychology

Robin West

Robin West was awarded the Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) Mentor Award for outstanding research supervision of undergraduate and graduate students at the American Psychological Association meeting in New Orleans on August 13, 2006.

Physics

Jacobo Konigsberg

Jacobo Konigsberg was featured on the January 26th edition of National Public Radio's Science Friday, which focused on high energy physics. Jacobo Konigsberg is the spokesman for The Collider Detector at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

Religion

Richard Hiers

Richard Hiers presented a paper in San Francisco on April 10 at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association.
The session was captioned, "Individual vs. Institutional Academic Freedom." The paper was entitled: "First Amendment Academic
Freedom Rights of Universities: Judicial Fabrication of New Clothes for the Emperor."

Richard Hiers presented the paper "Justice and Compassion in Biblical Law" at the "Compassion and Justice on the Personal and Global Levels" conference held on April 5, 2006 at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Bron Taylor

Bron Taylor recently participated in a workshop in Oslo, Norway within the international discourse on environmental sustainability. He prepared comments for the discussion titled “Religion and Ethics in Models for Sustainability” for “Sustainability and Democracy: A Need for Alternatives,” a preparatory workshop in advance of the 2007 International Conference on the 20th Anniversary of the Brundtland Report.

Taylor also gave a series of lectures. He presented “From the Ground Up: Growing a Green Future for Religion and Ethics” at the Ethics, Values, and the Environment Conference, co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, and the Center for the Environment, Harvard University in March. Taylor gave a public lecture on “Globalization and Earth-Based Spiritualities” at Hamilton College in March. He also gave “Globalizing Green Religion: Nature Religion from Deep Ecology, to Radical Environmentalism, and the United Nations” at the Universitetet i Bergen in Norway during February.

Romance Languages and Literatures

Luis Alvarez-Castro

Luis Alvarez-Castro presented the paper "The Existential Blackmail as a Meaning-Making Device in Unamuno's Fictions" at the 5th International Conference on Hispanic Literature in Lima, Peru on March 10, 2006. In addition, Dr. Alvarez-Castro chaired a panel on the literary generation of 1898.

Andrés Avellaneda

Dr. Andrés Avellaneda participated in several international academic events during the summer, 2006. He was the keynote speaker at the Sixth Orbis Tertius International Conference on Theory and Literary Criticism (May 10-12), sponsored by the National University of La Plata, the Argentine Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Spanish Government. He read a paper titled “Deseos de la disciplina: viaje etnológico al latinoamericanismo estadounidense”. He was given the title “Distinguished Guest of Honor” (Huésped de Honor Extraordinario) by the President of the University of La Plata.

In late July, Dr. Avellaneda was a special guest participant in a round table on literature and politics organized by the Institute of Literary Studies and the Chair of Introduction to Literature (Universidad de La Plata). In August, he read a paper titled “Escritores, terratenientes, cabecitas: discursos de la alteridad en los cuarenta” at the conference “El peronismo. Políticas culturales (1946-2006)”. The conference, held at the Instituto Superior Octubre in Buenos Aires, was co-sponsored by the University of Southern California, the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and the Palenque Rugendas Foundation.

Sylvie Blum-Reid

Sylvie Blum-Reid presented "20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium"
in Miami on March 30th, 2006. The special session "Situer l'obscurite du dire" was organized by Dr. B. Cailler. Presenting Dr. H. Blondeau "Ecrire le dire, decrire le dire," as well as Dr. A. Sow "La Langue a l'epreuve: 'Johnny Chien mechant' et 'Allah n'est pas oblige.'

Bernadette Cailler

Bernadette Cailler organized and chaired a RLL panel at the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, University of Miami, Coral Gables, March 30-April 1. Her own paper was entitled: "Chassé-croisé entre Aimé Césaire ( 'Poésie et connaissance', 1945) et Lorand Gaspar (/Approche de la parole/, 1978).

William Calin

William Calin presented the paper “Lecture de Michel Tronc” at the International Association of Occitan Studies meeting in Bordeaux France. He also lectured at the University of Toronto on “The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland,” which is the subject of his next book. Calin also gave a talk on “The French Tradition and Dunbar's ‘Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’” for the Scottish Literature division of the Modern Language Association.

Raymond Gay-Crosier

Raymond Gay-Crosier presented the keynote presentation, "Albert Camus : Our Familiar Stranger" at the International Conference on Albert Camus. The Conference was held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison on September 23.

Charles A. Perrone

While on sabbatical in AY 2005-06, Prof. Perrone accepted a series of invitations to speak around the country and the hemisphere:

• Keynote Address: "Insularity, Invention, and Interface: Brazil & Lyric In the Americas." 12th Annual Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. March 25, 2006.
• "Mapping the Marvelous Megalopolis: São Paulo and Modernist Imaginations." Great Cities in Literature and Film, Spring Lecture Series. Department of Spanish French Italian and Portuguese. University of Illinois, Chicago. March 3, 2006.
• "Scions of Tropicália: from Inter-American Aesthetics to Chico Science." Department of Foreign Languages/Center for Latin American Studies. Arizona State University. Tempe, Az. Feb. 2, 2006.
• "Difusão e recepção de OA nos EUA, ou Os as do ás e ode a O de A: abordagens e adesões de artistas e acadêmicos americanos à antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade." Encontro Internacional de Antropofagia. SESC Pompéia. São Paulo, Brazil. December 15, 2005.
• "Situating the Americas and Transamerican Poetics in Neo-Epics of Brazil." Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. December 1, 2005.
• "'Following the Song': Studying Sixties' Music in Brazil." Musical Vanguards: Latin American Music and Politics since 1959. Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures. Princeton University. November 18, 2005.

Sociology

Constance Shehan

The National Council on Family Relations 2006 Fellows Committee met at the 68th NCFR Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota and selected Connie Shehan, Ph.D. as a NCFR Fellow for 2006. NCFR Fellows are nominated by their peers and selected for their history of outstanding contributions to the field of family studies in such areas as published scholarship, innovative and influential teaching presentations, development and implementation of significant intervention of programs designed to promote healthy family relations, development and implementation of innovative curricula for training professionals in family studies, social policy support for family issues, and a consistent record of superior contributions to NCFR over time.

Upward Bound

Juliun Kinsey

Juliun Kinsey, sophomore at Loften High School, was selected by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) as one of only 30 students nationwide to receive the National Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for 2007.  Juliun is enrolled in the University of Florida Upward Bound College Preparatory Program.

He was recognized for the business plan he developed for ''Eagle Pro Apparel,'' a business that will sell uniforms and other ''spirit gear'' to students at Loften. Kinsey says the business will capitalize on the growing number of sports programs available at Loften.  The eagle is Loften’s mascot.

Upward Bound Director Dr. Barbara E. McDade said that Juliun is an excellent student and leader in the program and commended him on this latest of his achievements.

Juliun receives an all-expense paid trip to New York and a cash award of $500.  He and his teacher will attend “Dare to Dream” -- NFTE’s 14th Annual Salute to the Entrepreneurial Spirit Awards Dinner, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City on April 18.

He and other students will be honored along with such notable Entrepreneurs of the Year as:

• John Murphy, CEO of OppenheimerFunds
• David “Tiger” Williams, Founder of Williams Trading, LLC
• Art Ciocca, Chairman of The Wine Group, and
• Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Juliun is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Janet Kinsey of LaCrosse.

Women's Studies and Gender Research

Tace Hedrick

Dr. Hedrick, presented "Conserving the Spiritual Body of the World: Spiritualism, Mestizaje, and Sexuality in Gabriela Mistral and Gloria Anzaldúa", at LASA (Latin American Studies Association), held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on March 16-18 2006. Dr. Hedrick presented this paper as part of a session she also organized, "Queering the Cosmic Race: Sexualities and Spiritualisms in Latin American, Latina and Chicana Writers."

Zoology

Brian Silliman

Dr. Silliman received a $300,000 award from the Mellon Foundation to support a program of ecological research and training.

Betty Smocovitis

Professor Betty Smocovitis of Zoology and History, gave the opening Plenary Lecture at Botany 2006, "The Lessons of History: A Historian Reflects on 100 Years of American Botany."

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