Faculty Honors

TYLER PRIZE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACHIEVEMENT

The 2018 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement—often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for the Environment”—has been awarded to Rutgers University–New Brunswick biological oceanographer Paul Falkowski. The School of Environmental and Biological Sciences distinguished professor shares the prize with Harvard biological oceanographer James J. McCarthy. The two Tyler Prize laureates were recognized for “their enormous contributions to fighting climate change through increasing our scientific understanding of how Earth’s climate works, as well as bringing together that knowledge for the purpose of policy change."

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

Jayne Anne Phillips, author, professor, and founding director of the M.F.A. in creative writing program at Rutgers University–Newark, was elected in 2018 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The academy’s  membership of 250 is divided into departments of art, literature, and music, and only academicians may nominate and elect new members.

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

Patrick Rosal, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden, has been named a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Creative Writing (Prose) Fellow. In 2017, Rosal was named a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and his poetry collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian, won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION

Nicolás Pereda, director of the Rutgers Filmmaking Center at Rutgers University–New Brunswick’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, has been awarded a 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Guggenheim fellowships enable recipients to “engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts.” He was cited for his work that "explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools."

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH

The American Association for Cancer Research has recognized medical oncologist Joseph R. Bertino with its 2018 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research. Bertino, a senior adviser to the director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and university professor of medicine and pharmacology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, was honored for “basic science discoveries in the fields of drug action and tumor cell resistance.”

American Marketing Association

Jerome Williams—Rutgers University­–Newark executive vice chancellor, provost, distinguished professor, and Prudential Chair at Rutgers Business School—is the recipient of the American Marketing Association’s Marketing and Society Special Interest Group (MASSIG) 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award. In honoring Williams, MASSIG noted “his scholarship on critically important issues such as marketplace inclusion, social justice, and public policy” and his many publications on “topics related to promoting diversity, reducing childhood obesity, reducing marketplace discrimination, promoting multicultural marketing and advertising, and understanding ethics and social justice issues in marketing.”

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Three assistant professors at the Rutgers University–New Brunswick School of Engineering have earned 2018 National Science Foundation CAREER awards that are given to early-career faculty who demonstrate excellence in integrating teaching and research. The awardees are: Janne Lindqvist (electrical and computer engineering), left, for cell phone security; Ronke Olabisi (biomedical engineering), center, for tissue engineering and wound healing; and George Tsilomelekis (chemical and biochemical engineering) for more efficient production of propylene, which is used to make many materials.

AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY

Three mathematicians in the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, were named 2018 fellows of the American Mathematical Society. With 47 fellows, Rutgers leads the world in the number of fellows in the society. This year’s fellows are Lev Borisov, for “contributions to algebraic geometry and mirror symmetry”; Feng Luo, for “contributions to Teichmueller theory, conformal geometry, hyperbolic geometry, 3-manifolds, combinatorial topology and computer graphics”; and Stephen Miller, for “contributions to analytic number theory, cryptography, and theoretical physics.”

ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION

Two Rutgers University–New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences faculty were named 2018 research fellows of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. They are physicist Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler, left, who studies “Quark Gluon Plasma, the liquid that filled the universe milliseconds after the Big Bang,” and computer scientist and mathematician Shubhangi Saraf, right, who applies “mathematical methods to understand what problems are efficiently solvable on a computer.” According to the Sloan Foundation, fellows “represent the most promising scientific researchers working today.”

BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE

Rutgers University–Newark creative writing professor Tayari Jones has been named the 2017–2018 Shearing Fellow by the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas (UNLV). Each year, the institute offers Bennett Fellowships, including the Shearing, to three critically acclaimed writers who contribute to the cultural landscape of UNLV and the larger Las Vegas community.

ASSOCIATION OF NURSES IN AIDS CARE

Suzanne Willard, professor and associate dean of global health at the School of Nursing has received the 2017 Association of Nurses in AIDS Care Lifetime Achievement Award. An HIV nurse clinician who focuses on prevention of mother to child transmission, Willard started the first preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinic in Newark to help prevent HIV transmission.

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

The American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded the distinction of fellow to four Rutgers faculty in 2017 “in recognition of their contributions to science and technology, scientific leadership, and extraordinary achievements across disciplines.” The fellows are molecular biologist Vivian Bellofatto, far left, New Jersey Medical School; pathologist Arnold Rabson, second from left, director of the Child Health Institute of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; mathematician Peter March, third from left, executive dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and molecular biologist Richard Padgett, far right, Waksman Institute of Microbiology.

CLARIVATE ANALYTICS

Five Rutgers University–New Brunswick faculty were included in the 2017 Clarivate Analytics lists of Highly Cited Researchers. They are materials engineer Manish Chhowalla, School of Engineering; food scientists Chi-Tang Ho and Qingrong Huang, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; ecologist Rachael Winfree, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; and statistician Cun-Hui Zhang, School of Arts and Sciences. Researchers on the list rank in the “top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science,” Clarivate Analytics’s research citation index. The list covers 21 fields in the sciences and social sciences.

Simons Foundation

Four Rutgers University–New Brunswick professors are among 53 outstanding mathematicians and theoretical physicists awarded Simons Fellowships in 2017. School of Arts and Sciences faculty member Gabriel Kotliar, left, was named a Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics and School of Arts and Sciences faculty members Jeff Kahn, Alex Kontorovich, center, and Natasa Sesum, right, were named Simons Fellows in Mathematics. With four awardees, Rutgers University–New Brunswick ties with MIT for the most Simons Fellows in 2017. In 2016, four Rutgers–New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences mathematicians were named Simons Fellows, the most of any university in 2016. They are Lev Borisov, Fioralba Cakoni, Liping Liu, and Avraham Soffer.