Affiliated Faculty Shine

Winning awards, achieving recognition, attaining elite appointments: Calit2-affiliated faculty are distinguishing themselves in multiple arenas.

Chancellor’s Professor and ICS Associate Dean Michael Goodrich was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his contributions to data structures and algorithms for combinatorial and geometric problems.

The Fellow designation, granted to the top 1 percent of ACM members for their exceptional contributions to the computing field, is the organization’s most prestigious recognition. Goodrich will be formally recognized at the organization’s annual awards banquet, June 26, 2010, in San Diego.

The Russian Academy of Natural Sciences awarded Rui de Figueiredo, research professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and mathematics, its prestigious 2009 P. L. Kapitsa Gold Medal.  De Figueiredo was recognized for his pioneering contributions to the mathematical foundations and applications of signal processing.The P. L. Kapitsa Gold Medal was instituted in 1994 to honor Nobel Prize winner Pyotr L. Kapitsa.  de Figueiredo joins a long list of other Nobel laureates and distinguished scientists who have won the medal.

Douglas C. Wallace, Donald Bren Professor of Molecular Medicine and director of UCI’s Center for Molecular & Mitochondrial Medicine and Genetics, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences’ prestigious Institute of Medicine. Election to the institute, established in 1970, is considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine.

Wallace, whose research advances treatment for chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes, is only the second UCI faculty member elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. (Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland is the other.)

He is a member of the Calit2 Division Council.

“Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing," written by professor emeritus Ken Kraemer, director of the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) and the Personal Computing Industry Center (PCIC), won the 2009 award for Outstanding Academic Title from Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.  Kraemer, a former Calit2 Division Council member, wrote the book with Margaret S. Elliott.

Each year, Choice, which reviews higher education-oriented academic books, electronic media and Internet resources, singles out its most significant reviewed work. The Outstanding Academic Title award is based on several criteria, including excellence in presentation and scholarship, originality, value to undergraduate students, and importance in building undergraduate library collections.

Education professor Liane Brouillette’s research was featured recently in the Miller-McCune blog, which reports on academic research that addresses social concerns in education, politics, the environment, economics, health and urban affairs. The blog drew attention to Brouillette’s paper, "How the Arts Help Children to Create Healthy Social Scripts," which contends that children need to learn more than reading, writing and multiplying to become successful adults.

"If all teacher certification programs at the elementary level were to equip teacher candidates with arts-based techniques for supporting the social-emotional development of children," she writes, "this would not only benefit students but also create a broader base of support for the arts."

Four Calit2 affiliates are among the most recent Orange County Medical Association’s “Physicians of Excellence.”  Urologist Dr. Ralph Clayman, neurologist Dr. Steven Cramer, pediatric neurologist Dr. Ira Lott and gerontologist Dr. Laura Mosqueda were included on the list that appeared in the January 2010 issue of Orange Coast Magazine.

The O.C .Medical Association compiles the list by surveying local physicians and rating them on leadership, teaching, mentoring, research and humanitarian service.