Kudos: Excellence in Music, Government, Russian, and More

Kudos is an occasional column that recognizes Dartmouth faculty, students, and staff who have received awards or other honors. Did you or a colleague recently receive an award or honor? Please tell us about it: dartmouth.news@dartmouth.edu.

Tonima Tasnim Ananna, a research assistant in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, was selected for Science News' 2020 SN 10: Scientists to Watch list, which recognizes "young stars in scientific research who have already made big contributions in their fields, proving their potential for much greater impact in the years to come." Each of the SN—all early- and mid-career scientists age 40 and under and all nominated by a Nobel laureate, member of the National Academy of Sciences or SN 10 alumni—were featured in Science News.

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William Cheng, an associate professor of music and chair of the Department of Music, received the 2020 Marcia Herndon Book Award from the Society of Ethnomusicology's Gender and Sexualities Taskforce, for the book Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, which he co-edited with Boston University's Gregory Barz. The committee "recognized the volume's broad ranging impact on ethnomusicology as a discipline, especially as it defies the cisheteronormative assumptions that have often informed how we understand fieldwork and this important social, emotional, and musical labor," according to the award citation.

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Sean Griffin, a lecturer in the Department of Russian and the Department of Religion, has been awarded the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize, 2021, for The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, which last year won the Bruce Lincoln Book Prize. "Griffin makes an energetic, even passionate, case for the vital importance of the liturgy as a source for studying premodern Christian societies … and shows how [medieval historiography] continues to pervade Russian history today," the prize committee announced.

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Karl Griswold, an associate professor of engineering, and Charles Sullivan, a professor of engineering, have been elected National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Senior Members. This distinction is awarded by the NAI to active faculty, scientists, and administrators at member institutions who have demonstrated success in patents, licensing and commercialization and who have produced technologies that have the potential for a real impact on the welfare of society. This class of NAI Senior Members comprises 61 accomplished academic inventors representing 36 research universities, governmental entities and nonprofit institutes worldwide. They are named inventors on over 617 issued U.S. patents.

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Associate Professor of Government Jason Lyall's book Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War was selected by Foreign Affairs as one of the "Best Books of 2020." Lyall, the inaugural James Wright Chair of Transnational Studies in the government department, "uses fascinating case studies to show how armed forces whose composition reflects severe inequalities between ethnic groups will fare worse in battle than their more equal counterparts. The statistical analysis backing up his claim sets a standard that others will struggle to match," wrote Foreign Affairs.

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Associate Professor of German Studies Petra McGillen received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the Modern Language Association for The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print, a book the award committee described as "a field-changing study of 19th-century realism, informed by contemporary media theory and grounded in extensive archival research and historical detail." According to the citation, the book, which explores 19th-century German journalist, novelist, and poet Theodor Fontane's creative process, "shifts scholarly understanding of Fontane from the author-genius venerated by Romanticism to the calculating compiler of the modern media world."

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Matthew Olzmann, a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing, is one of 35 poets to receive a 2021 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The competitive award is designed "to encourage the production of new work and allow writers the time and means to write," according to the NEA website. Olzmann is the author of three poetry collections, including the 2011 Kundiman Prize-wining Mezzanines, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route, forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2022. A recipient of fellowships from the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American Writers, MacDowell, and the Kresge Arts Foundation, his work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize XLV, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.

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A team of researchers from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Thayer School of Engineering, and Geisel School of Medicine has received a Gold Snapshot Award from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. The team's award-winning abstract, "A Multivariate Machine Learning Algorithm for Occult Hemorrhage in a Porcine Model," uses noninvasive technologies to take measurements from various locations in the body in order to detect bleeding. The abstract's first author is Samuel Klein, a research associate at DHMC. Other members of the winning team from DHMC and Geisel include physician Norman Paradis, professor of emergency medicine at Geisel; Joseph Minichiello, Geisel '22; Justin Anderson, Geisel '22; Alexander Lindqwister, Geisel '22; physician Karen Moodie; physician Zachary Wanken; and Victor Borza '18, Thayer '18. The abstract's co-authors from Dartmouth Engineering include Jonathan Elliott, adjunct assistant professor of engineering; Ryan Halter, professor of engineering and of surgery; Alexandra Hamlin '16 ,Thayer '17, '19, Guarini '19; Ethan Murphy, assistant professor of engineering; Navid Rashedi, Thayer '21; Elisha Ronzio; Yifei Sun, Thayer '19; and Vikrant Vaze, the Stata Family Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth.

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Ezekiel Vergara '21 has been selected for the American Political Science Association's 2021-2022 Diversity Fellowship Program. The fellowship competition is open to individuals from underrepresented backgrounds who are applying to or in the early stages of doctoral programs in political science. A government and philosophy major, Vergara specializes in political theory, Cuban politics, and the ethics of warfare. He is currently writing his honors thesis, which examines the ethics of political revolutions. Vergara has also conducted research as a Mellon Mays associate fellow, a James O. Freedman Presidential Scholar, and a Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program scholar. In 2019, he was awarded the Phillips Family Award in Ethics for his writing on the ethics of punishment. Vergara intends to earn a doctorate in government.