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

Kenneth Brown and Sonja Hess, both of the Department of Nutrition, and Stephen Vosti of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, along with Shawn K. Baker of Helen Keller International, recently received a prize of 25,000 Danish kroners ($5,020 U.S.) from the Copenhagen Consensus Center for their paper comparing the cost-effectiveness of different nutritional supplementation strategies for controlling zinc deficiency among children in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper was presented Nov. 9 by Hess at the UNICEF House in New York.

Stanley Sue, professor of psychology, has won two awards. He received a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association, and he also received the 2009 Distinguished Service to the Profession of Psychology Award from the Los Angeles County Psychological Association.

Kazuo Yamazaki, professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He is one of nine industry leaders elected to the Society’s College of fellows this year. Yamazaki’s work focuses on using computers to control machine tools in manufacturing, as well as the design and control of manufacturing processes and development of related software.

Suad Joseph, professor of anthropology and women and gender studies, was elected president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association, the primary scholarly association for scholars who do research on the Middle East. She will serve as president-elect in 2009-2010 and president in 2010-2011.

Lucy Puls, professor of art, recently received a four week residency opportunity at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Residents are provided a studio, private room, meals, and a “supportive environment,” according to Yaddo, an artists’ working community on a 400-acre wooded estate.

Robin Hansen, a professor of pediatrics at UC Davis and founding director of the Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities at the UC Davis MIND Institute, has been appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities. The 29-member council is an independent state agency charged with ensuring that people with developmental disabilities and their families receive the services and supports they need.

Margherita Heyer-Caput, professor of Italian, recently received the 2009 Ennio Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies for her book Grazia Deledda’s Dance of Modernity (University of Toronto Press 2008). Heyer-Caput’s work examines Deledda, one of the most significant Italian women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, in the context of European philosophical and literary modernity.