This column offers a sampling of honors recently awarded to UC Davis faculty, staff and units:

Nine people were honored Oct. 9 at UC Davis with an Award of Distinction during the 21st annual College Celebration for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

The honorees include faculty, staff, alumni and friends of UC Davis’ founding college. The awards are presented annually to those whose contributions and achievements enrich the image and reputation of UC Davis and enhance its ability to provide public service.

This year’s recipients include:

Outstanding Faculty

John Bruhn, a dairy food processing specialist emeritus in the Department of Food Science and Technology, has spent his career improving the quality and taste of milk, cheese and other dairy products.

Bruhn became a UC Cooperative Extension specialist soon after earning his doctoral degree from UC Davis in 1968. In the 1970s, he led a national effort to identify the source of iodine contamination on dairy farms and at food processors. He also helped establish the Dairy Research and Information Center at UC Davis in 1995 and served as its founding director until 2002.

Outstanding Staff

Thomas Kaiser, the executive assistant dean for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, has helped the college navigate some of its most challenging budget years.

For 17 years, Kaiser has provided critical support for the college by developing new budget models for allocation of resources, especially in the early 1990s and early 2000s when the college faced significant budget reductions. He has improved financial transparency and accessibility while collaborating with academic planners on a wide range of projects, especially in the construction realm. Kaiser is a strong advocate for staff and has streamlined operations to make for more efficient, manageable workloads.

The college also gave out other awards, including Outstanding Alumni awards to Gurdev Khush and Martha Guzman Aceves, and Friends of the College awards to James Lugg, Mary Patterson, Howard-Yana Shapiro, Ann Veneman, and Fritz Maytag.

To learn more about the recipients, visit the college’s Web site at caes.ucdavis.edu/NewsEvents/Events/college-celebration.

Elsewhere on campus, Christopher Reynolds, chair of the Department of Music and a professor of musicology, has won a $2,000 prize from the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music for his article, “‘Porgy and Bess’: An American ‘Wozzeck.’” Reynolds earlier won an H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for the same article, in which he presents significant new evidence to support his theory that structural elements of George Gershwin’s score for Porgy and Bess pay homage to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.

Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the UC Davis School of Medicine, has been awarded the 2009 Herbert W. Nickens Faculty Fellowship by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the nation’s leading medical education organization. Miller will receive the award during the AAMC’s annual meeting Nov. 6 -11 in Boston.

Philip Kass, a professor of epidemiology and chair of the Department of Population Health and Reproduction in the School of Veterinary Medicine, recently received the school’s 2009 teaching award from his faculty peers. The award recognizes Kass’ outstanding work in delivering knowledge to his students. In their evaluations, his students have praised him for promoting critical thinking, being passionate about education and for giving.