The Society for Personality and Social Psychology announced a pair of honors for UC Davis faculty:

Shaver

• Distinguished Professor Phil Shaver — Career Contribution Award, honoring a scholar who has made major theoretical and-or empirical contributions to social psychology and-or personality psychology or to bridging these areas.

• Professor Rick Robins — Diener Award in Personality, recognizing a scholar (approximately 15 to 25 years from his or her first tenure-track appointment) whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the personality field and-or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.

Both honorees work in the fields of social-personality as well as development psychology.

The awards are for 2012, and the society plans to present them at next year’s annual meeting, to be held in January in New Orleans.

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The American Chemical Society has recognized James Seiber, professor emeritus of environmental toxicology, for his outstanding achievements in agricultural chemistry, by selecting him as the recipient of the Kenneth A. Spencer Award.

Seiber, a teacher and researcher in the areas of chemical contaminant analysis, transport and environmental fate, joined the UC Davis faculty in 1969. He served as chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences, and associate dean of research in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

In 1992 he became the founding director of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. Also at UNR, he initiated a multidisciplinary program of research and graduate education.

In 1998, he was named director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Regional Research Center in Albany.

He returned to UC Davis as interim chair of the Department of Food Science and Technology, 2009-11. 

He has served since 1998 as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, an American Chemical Society publication.

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The International Communication Association recently presented its annual B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award to George Barnett, professor and chair, Department of Communication, recognizing him as a role model who has had a major impact on the field of communication.

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Dean Kevin Johnson of the School of Law recently received an International Latino Book Award for Immigration Law and the U.S.-Mexico Border.

Johnson is the Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies in the School of Law, and his special interest include immigration law and policy.

He shared the award, for best reference book, English language, with his co-author, Professor Bernard Trujillo of the Valparaiso University School of Law.

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The American Sociological Association recently gave awards to UC Davis faculty members for a book and a paper.

• Drew Halfmann, associate professor, Department of Sociology — Charles Tilly Award, from the association’s section on Collective Behaviors and Social Movements, for his book Doctors and Demonstrators: How Political Institutions Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain and Canada.

• Robert Faris, assistant professor — He and Professor Diane Felmlee, a former colleague of his in the Department of Sociology, shared the James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award, from the Crime, Law and Deviance section, for “Status Struggles: Network Centrality and Gender Segregation in Same-and Cross-Gender Aggression.” Felmlee served on the UC Davis faculty from 1989 to 2011, and, in the spring of 2012, joined the Penn State Department of Sociology.

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

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