Isbell

Anthropology professor Lynne A. Isbell has won the 2014 W.W. Howells Book Prize from the Biological Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association, for her volume The Fruit, the Tree and the Serpent: Why We See So Well.

Read more about her research.

The W.W. Howells award recognizes books that represent the highest standards of scholarship, readability and informing a wider audience of the significance of biological anthropology.

The Biological Anthropology Section established the prize in 1993 to honor William White Howells, emeritus professor of anthropology at Harvard University. He died in 2005.

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Simine Vazire, associate professor in the Department of Psychology, has received the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of individual differences.

The award is given to outstanding psychologists who are nine years or less post-doctorate. Vazire, who joined UC Davis in 2014, received her doctorate from the University of Texas in 2006. She was an assistant and associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis before joining UC Davis in 2014.

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Law professor David Horton recently won the Association of American Law Schools Scholarly Paper Competition, open to faculty members who have been teaching for five years or less.

For the paper, “In Partial Defense of Probate: Evidence from Alameda County, California,” Horton used an original dataset of 668 probate administrations to challenge the conventional wisdom that probate is slow and expensive. 

Horton is scheduled to present the paper at the association’s 2015 annual meeting. The article is due to be published in The Georgetown Law Journal.

Horton joined the King Hall faculty in 2012. His primary research and teaching interests are wills and trusts, contracts and arbitration law. 

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The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University recently awarded a composition commission to Sam Nichols, a lecturer at UC Davis since 2002. His is one of 12 commissions to U.S. composers in the 2014 award cycle.

The commissions represent one of the principal ways that the Fromm Music Foundation seeks to “strengthen composition and to bring contemporary concert music closer to the public.” Besides the commissioning awards, the foundation offers subsidies to the ensembles that premiere the commissioned works.

The Fromm foundation is the legacy of Paul Fromm (1906-87), one of the most significant patrons of contemporary art music in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.

Nichols has previously received commissions from Earplay and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. He received the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award for his string quartet, Refuge, and other awards and fellowships from the League of Composers, the Composers Conference and the Montalvo Center for the Arts.

Upcoming projects include a concerto for cellist David Russell and the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra to be performed in the fall of 2015.

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Elizabeth Freeman, professor of English, recently received the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in the journal American Literature in 2014. The essay, “Sacra/mentality in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.” The 1936 novel was one of the first by a well-known writer to portray explicit homosexuality.

Freeman, who specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, has written two books: The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories.

Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. She herself is co-academic editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computer Society recently presented its 2014 Visualization Career Award to Ken Joy, professor emeritus of computer science.

The award recognizes Joy for his research in the mathematical representation of data for visualization, and for his service to the community.

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The recent IT customer service improvement project, “Building a Service-Oriented Culture at UC Davis,” has received a second award.

Last summer, the project took gold in UC’s Larry L. Sautter Award program, recognizing innovation in information technology around the university system. More recently, the project won the 2014 Service Improvement Award from HDI, an international trade association for the technical service and support industry.

“The recognition is great for our team,” said Anita Nichols, client service manager at Information and Educational Technology, “but with or without awards, it’s our goal to provide the tools the campus needs to deliver IT services.”

The project includes the ServiceNow system to track and respond to customers’ requests; the IT Service Catalog, which gathers information in one, consistently maintained, online catalog, instead of spreading it over a maze of websites; the IT Knowledge Base, comprising articles, how-to instructions and troubleshooting guidelines; the IT Self-Service portal; and Service Level Management, which creates agreements on the level of service provided

IET coordinated the project, while collaborating with other departments on the ServiceNow and Knowledge Base components. ServiceNow is also used by the School of Law; School of Education; Offices of the Chancellor and Provost; Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies; College of Engineering; Arts Administrative Group; Student Affairs; and Campus Planning, Facilities and Safety.

An HDI blog post says: “After just a year, this multiphase initiative is still in its infancy, and yet it has already yielded many important benefits. At UC Davis, it has resulted in greater operational efficiency, and it has enhanced customer service. It has also brought the IT service community together in the pursuit of common goals.”

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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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