Dr. Sabit Adanur, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, was awarded $75,374 to conduct research relating to the design, fabrication and testing of novel medical face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or future contagious viruses.
Dr. Steve Ditchkoff, the William R. and Fay Ireland Distinguished Professor in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, along with his co-editors, won The Wildlife Society’s 2020 Wildlife Publication Award in the “edited book” category for the book, Invasive Wild Pigs in North America: Ecology, Impacts, and Management, published in 2020 by CRC Press.
Dr. Julia S. Charles, associate professor in the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts, has published a new book, That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing, by University of North Carolina Press. In this study of racial passing literature, Charles examines how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves and articulate their sense of selfhood and communal belonging. Her teaching and research interests include racial crossing/passing literature, 19th- and 20th-century Black women writers, African American literary movements and depictions of mixed-race characters in American fiction.
Dr. Brian Via and Dr. Beatriz Erramuspe, director and research fellow, respectively, of the Forest Products Development Center in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, were awarded $247,142 to research development of a paper-based device for a cost-effective method to detect dangerous formaldehyde emissions in wood panels. The award are part of a $2.57 million award by the Alabama governor’s office to five of the state’s research institutions, Gov. Kay Ivey announced.
Dr. Shiwen Mao, the Earle C. Williams Scholar Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center, along with his former students received the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society’s 2020 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award for their paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. The award is presented to the team with the best systems paper published in the past five years.
The team of authors — Mao, Drs. Xuyu Wang, Lingjun Gao and Santosh Pandey — received the award for their paper, “CSI-Based Fingerprinting for Indoor Localization: A Deep Learning Approach.”
Dr. Jay Mittal, associate professor in the Master of Community Planning program in the Department of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts, was awarded the 2020 Kenneth J. Groves Jr. Distinguished Leadership Award for a Professional Planner at the annual conference of the Alabama Chapter of the American Planning Association. This award is given to an accomplished planner for significant and sustained contributions to the planning profession.
Dr. Jakita Thomas was included in Cell Mentor’s list of 1,000 inspiring Black scientists in America. Thomas is the Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and director of the CUltuRally & SOcially Relevant (CURSOR) Computing Lab. Her research interests include exploring the development of computational algorithmic thinking, promoting access to health care information and services for underserved populations, improving reasoning using expert cases, scientific reasoning, complex cognitive skills learning and computer-supported collaborative learning. Thomas helped launch the inaugural Black Women in Computing Conference, which has since morphed into a computer science education and workforce development organization called blackcomputeHER.