IN THIS ISSUE: LAS | MEDICINE | NCSA | LIBRARY
liberal arts and sciences
George Batzli, professor of animal biology, received the C. Hart Merriam Award, given each year to one scientist in recognition of outstanding research contributions to the science of mammalogy. He received the award at the national meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists.
Established in 1974 to honor outstanding contributions to mammalogy, the award is given to someone with “a record of excellence in scientific research and either education of mammalogists or service to the discipline of mammalogy.” The recipient is invited to address the society in a plenary session at its annual meeting, as well as to prepare a manuscript for the Journal of Mammalogy that is based on this presentation.
Stephen Hartnett, professor of speech communication, was awarded the National Communication Association’s James A. Winans and Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address. The award honors Hartnett’s recent book, “Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fiction of Antebellum America,” published by the University of Illinois Press.
Tzumin Lee, professor of cell and structural biology and in the College of Medicine, has been selected for a Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences by the Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Fund Inc., based in New York City. Tzumin is the first neuroscientist on the Urbana campus to receive this honor.
medicine
Sari Gilman Aronson, interim head of the department of psychiatry, and Robert W. Kirby, associate dean of clinical affairs, both at the UI College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign, received the Outstanding Poster Presentation Award from the National Residency Project to Improve End-of-Life Care (NRELEP). Their work, “Improving Knowledge and Communication of Advance Directives,” received the award during the organization’s March meeting in Chicago.
While it is increasingly important for physicians to appreciate, understand and manage end-of-life issues, research shows that physicians receive little formal training in this area. To address this need, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the NRELEP to develop postgraduate training for physicians regarding end-of-life issues. In 1998, the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Urbana became one of the first sites in the nation to participate in this effort. The residency program developed a curriculum covering the many aspects of end-of-life issues with a special emphasis on advance directives. The poster developed by Aronson and Kirby details the development and implementation of a competency-based assessment (an Observed Clinical Skills Exam) of knowledge and communication of advance directives, which is the first instrument of its kind.
ncsa
Work by a team of UI scientists from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications was featured in a program on the Discovery Channel. The science documentary, “Unfolding Universe,” which was broadcast June 3, followed a team of astronomers and scientists to find clues about the origins of our galaxy. The scientists attempt to pinpoint the location of a strange and dangerous presence a massive black hole hidden at the core of the galaxy. The NCSA-produced visualizations make up 20 minutes of the documentary, almost half the total air time.
The program was co-produced by Donna Cox, NCSA’s interim division director for experimental technologies and professor of art and design, and Robert Patterson, an NCSA visualization programmer.
Cox, Patterson and Stuart Levy, NCSA senior research programmer, spent months working with leading astronomers, astrophysicists and computational scientists using NCSA’s Virtual Director software to develop visually dramatic animations that help tell the story of the birth and life of the Milky Way galaxy.
university library
Janis Johnston, director of the Albert E. Jenner Jr. Memorial Law Library, has been elected vice president/president-elect of the American Association of Law Libraries. Founded in 1906, the mission of the association is to promote and enhance the value of law libraries to legal and public communities, to foster the profession of law librarianship and to provide leadership in the field of legal information.
Stephen Smith, head of Rapid Cataloging, has been awarded the 2002 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award. Sponsored by the Library and Information Technology Association, the award recognizes outstanding achievement in communication that educates practitioners in the field of library and information technology. Smith won the award for his interactive CD-ROM tutorial, “The IOUG Introductory Authority File Workshop.” It is designed to train catalogers to help users access information in their local library catalogs. The tutorial is expected to be available this summer.
Marek Sroka, head of Slavic and East European cataloging, has been awarded the 2002 Justin Winsor Prize for Library History Essay. The award is presented annually by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association in honor of Winsor, a distinguished 19th century librarian, historian and bibliographer who also served as the associations first president. Srokas essay was titled “The Destruction of Jewish Libraries and Archives in Cracow During World War II.”
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