The National Academy of Sciences and the American Educational Research Association are among the recent organizations honoring faculty.
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University of Rochester faculty regularly earn regional, national, and international awards and honors for their professional contributions to research, scholarship, education, and community engagement.
As part of an ongoing series, we’re spotlighting their accomplishments.
Mark Bocko, Jessica Shang honored by Rochester Engineering Society
Mark Bocko, the Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences (CEIS), was named the Rochester Engineering Society’s 2022 Engineer of the Year. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in and contributions to the profession by engineers in the Rochester region. The society named Bocko an Engineer of Distinction in 2021.
Bocko’s academic career has spanned four decades at the University of Rochester, where he received his PhD in physics in 1984. Over the years, Bocko has explored multiple areas of basic and applied research on sensors, superconducting electronics, and acoustics. Early in his career, he collaborated on the first proposal for a practical superconducting quantum computer. Currently, his research includes the development of multimodal audio surfaces and 3D spatial sound reproduction and analysis. His work is reflected in more than 170 technical publications and 20 patents.
During his 15-year tenure as chair of the electrical and computer engineering department, he created a program in audio and music engineering that has grown to more than 100 undergraduates and master’s students since 2013.
Bocko is a tireless advocate of the Rochester region’s technology economy, university-industry collaboration, and technology transfer. With him at the helm, CEIS helped lay the groundwork for Rochester’s participation in AIM Photonics, which provides access to state-of-the-art integrated photonics fabrication, packaging, and testing facilities and services; CEIS also founded the Light and Sound Interactive Conference and Showcase held in 2017 and 2019. He continues to explore the region’s potential to become a major center for audio technology and sound/music production for new media.
- Discover how Bocko is designing a world of immersive sound.
Jessica Shang, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, was named a finalist for the Rochester Engineering Society’s 2022 Young Engineer of the Year. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in and contributions to the profession by young engineers in the Rochester region and to promote the importance of engineering to society.
Shang, who earned her PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, is in her seventh year at the University of Rochester. Her research covers a variety of disciplines, including fluid dynamics of the brain, turbulence, and viscosity at high-energy-density conditions. The common theme in her work is trying to understand the unseen through the lens of fluid dynamics.
In 2022, Shang received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to become academic role models and lead the missions of their departments. With the NSF award funding, Shang is creating a computational model to determine what “drives” the brain’s glymphatic system and helps it flush away metabolic wastes linked to Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. She also works with the Laboratory for Laser Energetics to improve the design of experiments aimed at achieving fusion by better understanding how viscosity dissipates energy in fuel plasmas.
Shang has garnered awards recognizing her academic achievements and her scholarly work from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Gates Foundation. She is a reviewer for Physical Review Fluids, AIAA Journal, and the Journal of Fluids and Structures and has served on a National Academy of Sciences committee reporting on the current state and proposed future of naval engineering.
- Learn more about Shang’s work studying viscosity in plasmas.
Kara Bren elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Kara Bren, the Richard S. Eisenberg Professor in Chemistry, has been elected a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most highly regarded honors for artistic, academic, and scientific leaders who engage in advancing the public good. Bren, a leading expert in bioinorganic and biophysical chemistry, has also been named a recipient of the 2023 Chemical Pioneer Award by the American Institute of Chemists, for her research on metalloproteins in the cytochrome c family.
Cytochromes c are a class of metalloproteins—proteins that bind metal ions to help them perform their tasks—that have an iron-containing group called heme tightly bound to them. Cytochromes c move and store charges and are important in processes that convert energy, such as respiration and photosynthesis. Bren has studied many aspects of cytochromes c, including how the structure of heme affects the energy and speed at which proteins transfer electrons; how movements and changes in the shape of the proteins can affect, and even alter, a protein’s function; and how these processes can be manipulated for various applications.
Recently, her lab has explored how cytochrome c derivatives can be used as catalysts in systems to extract hydrogen from water, leading to the production of hydrogen as an environmentally friendly, carbon-free energy source.
Bren earned a PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1995 and joined the University of Rochester in 1997 after serving as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California–Davis. Among other awards, she received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences and was the recipient of the University’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2018, she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She holds several patents for her research, which has been funded by organizations including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and US Department of Energy.
- Check out Bren’s project to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel from water.
Patrick Davies recognized for work on children’s socio-emotional adaptations
Patrick Davies, a professor in the Department of Psychology, has been awarded the 2023 Bowlby-Ainsworth Award by the New York Attachment Consortium and the Center for Mental Health Promotion. The award recognizes senior scholars who exemplify the standards of scholarship, collegiality, and mentoring that John Bowlby, a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, and American-Canadian developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth shared, taught, and valued. Davies is recognized for highlighting the distinction and relations between attachment and emotional security systems in family contexts.
Davies, who joined the Rochester faculty in 1997, studies children’s social and emotional adaptation (or maladaptation) within close personal relationships, especially within the family, and how children cope and adapt to stress. He’s particularly interested in understanding the nature and consequences of children’s responses to familial and interpersonal difficulties and why children exposed to family adversity are more vulnerable to psychopathology later.
At Rochester, he codirects the Rochester Center for Research on Children and Families and is a member of the TRANSFORM Center at Mt. Hope Family Center. The author or coauthor of four books and approximately 200 articles and chapters, Davies has served as the associate editor of the academic journal Development and Psychopathology since 2003.
- Learn about Davies’s research into the long-term effects of COVID-19.
David Hursh honored for social justice work in education
David Hursh, a professor in teaching and curriculum at the Warner School of Education and Human Development, was presented with the 2023 Paulo Freire Legacy Award, given by the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The award is given to scholars and activists widely recognized for their commitment to social justice and to transforming existing structures of oppression through education. Award recipients have advanced Freirean philosophy in theory and practice and made significant contributions to the field of critical pedagogy.
- Get more information about Hursh’s work.
William Jones inducted to National Academy of Sciences
William Jones, the Charles Frederick Houghton Professor of Chemistry, was formally inducted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2023, in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements to original research. The honor is one of the highest given to scientists in the United States.
Jones is world-renowned for his research on organometallic chemistry—the study of how metals interact with carbon-containing molecules—including, most notably, carbon-hydrogen bonds. His pioneering studies on the synthesis, structure, and reactivity of carbon-element bonds has led to the discovery of new methods for converting hydrocarbons into chemicals found in everyday products. For instance, Jones and his lab discovered a novel method of converting ethanol to butanol without producing unwanted byproducts. The method makes engine fuel more efficient and less corrosive and reduces planet-harming emissions.
Jones earned a PhD in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and served as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin before joining the Rochester faculty in 1980.
He has received many awards for his research, including the 2017 Organometallic Chemistry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry and a 2018 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award. In 2021, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 2003 to 2020.
Jones has also received several honors for teaching graduates and undergraduates at Rochester, including the 2009 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the 2019 William H. Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.
He has authored more than 280 journal articles and 10 book chapters, and his research has been funded by organizations including the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
- Read more about Jones’s project to convert ethanol to butanol.
Jennifer Kyker’s paper recognized by the American Musical Instrument Society
Jennifer Kyker, an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music and an associate professor in the Arthur Satz Department of Music, won the 2023 Frances Densmore Prize from the American Musical Instrument Society for her 2021 article “Music Under the Ground: Ethnomusicological Research on the Ground-Bow in Africa” in Ethnomusicology. The prize is given annually for the most distinguished article-length work in English that best furthers the society’s goal of promoting the study of the history, design, and use of musical instruments in all cultures and from all periods. The selection committee noted the article’s importance, which goes well beyond the specifics of the instrument on which it is based or the locales in which the ground-bow is found. The same article won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize for Advanced and Critical Essays in Organology last year.
Warner scholars’ paper wins journal prize
Educational leadership faculty members Karen DeAngelis and Brian Brent, the Earl B. Taylor Professor, and doctoral student Caiqun Xu at the Warner School of Education and Human Development are winners of the 2023 National Education Finance Academy’s Journal of Education Finance Article of the Year Award. The academic award is given annually to researchers whose manuscript in the journal demonstrates exceptional scholarly quality. The coauthors won the award for their article in the spring 2022 issue.
The paper provides the first comprehensive account of adequacy and equity in the distribution of counseling resources in K–12 school districts across the nation. Their work reveals the inadequacies and inequities in the distribution of school counselors among and within states.
- Learn more about their findings.
Martin Zand elected to ACTS board of directors
Martin Zand, the senior associate dean for clinical research and codirector of the CTSI has been elected to the board of directors for the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS). Zand will began a three-year term as a director-at-large at the end of the Translational Science conference on April 20.
