Law, education, GSM win communications awards

By Dateline staff

James Hildreth, dean of the College of Biological Sciences, has been elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.

The society, established in 1967, includes former postdoctoral fellows, postdoctoral degree recipients, house staff, and junior or visiting faculty who served for at least one year at Johns Hopkins and later gained marked distinction in their fields of physical, biological, medical, social or engineering sciences, or in the humanities.

Hildreth has been affiliated with a string of prestigious universities, earning his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1979; his doctorate in immunology from Oxford in 1982, as a Rhodes Scholar; and his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1987.

He later joined the Johns Hopkins medical school faculty, beginning his research on HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He moved to Meharry Medical College in Tennessee in 2005 and joined UC Davis as the dean of the College of Biological Sciences last year.

Johns Hopkins has scheduled an induction ceremony on April 10 for Hildreth and the other new scholars.

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Three faculty members have been named to the inaugural class of 77 Simons Foundation Fellows. The program, open to mathematicians and theoretical physicists, provides support to extend academic leaves for up to a year, allowing recipients to focus solely on research.

The fellows from UC Davis are Anne Schilling, professor, and Dan Romik, associate professor, both of the Department of Mathematics; and Warren Pickett, professor of physics.

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The California Board of Education has appointed Nancy McTygue, executive director of the UC Davis-based California History-Social Science Project, to the Instructional Quality Commission.

The panel, known as the Curriculum Commission up until Jan. 1, 2012, advises the state board in regard to kindergarten through grade-12 curriculum and instruction. McTygue is the only panel member with a university-affiliated post.

As director of the California History-Social Science Project, she oversees seven regional sites, each a collaborative of teachers (kindergarten through four-year college) and scholars dedicated to improving history and social science curriculum and instruction in the state’s schools.

The sites range from The History Project at UC Davis in the north, to the UCI History Project at UC Irvine in the south.

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Physics professor Robin Erbacher, part of the Fermilab team that detected the “top quark,” is a new member of the federal government’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel.

A swearing-in ceremony for Erbacher and other new members took place March 12 in Washington, D.C. The panel will serve through 2014.

The experts panel advises the government on research in theoretical and experimental physics, reporting jointly to the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Erbacher earned her doctorate from Stanford University and joined the UC Davis faculty in 2004. She is a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

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Professor Laura Marcu of the Department of Biomedical Engineering is a newly elected fellow of the professional organization SPIE, in recognition of her achievements in biomedical optics.

For example, she developed handheld probes for identifying the edges of tumors during surgery, and probes that can be inserted through catheters to investigate atherosclerotic plaques in heart disease.

SPIE added 75 fellows this year for their contributions to optics, photonics and imaging.

Founded in 1955 as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, it later changed its name to the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers and finally decided to simply go by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

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Kristen Connor and Cheryl Wraa of the UC Davis Health System have taken committee assignments in the Emergency Nurses Association, comprising more than 39,000 members in more than 30 countries around the world.

The association appointed Wraa, trauma program manager at the UC Davis Medical Center, to the Position Statement Review Committee, which considers the association’s positions on issues related to emergency nursing practice and emergency care.

Connor, a clinical resource nurse and a certified emergency nurse in the Emergency Department, received an appointment to the Membership and Component Relations Committee, addressing issues relating to member recruitment and retention. Connor is treasurer-elect of the California Emergency Nurses Association board of directors.

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Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of faculty and staff awards, for publication in Laurels. Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.