David Brody, professor emeritus of history, received the Sol Stetin Award for Labor History from the Sidney Hillman Foundation at a May 27 ceremony in New York City. The Sol Stetin award is given each year to a labor historian whose work "furthers our understanding of the working-class experience in America." Brody is the author of "In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker," among other titles.

Gary Snyder, professor emeritus of English, is the winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. Snyder, whose poetry collections include The Back Country and Danger on Peaks, began writing in the 1950s as a member of the Beat movement and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island.

Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the School of Law, was honored by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies as a 2008 NACCS Scholar. The association cited Johnson's "compelling, gripping, and deeply moral and ethical voice in the areas of civil rights and immigration law" and said that his is "one of the most noted voices on the hardships and racial profiling suffered by immigrants."

The American Society of Hispanic Economists honored Refugio Rochin, professor emeritus and chair of Chicana/o Studies, with its first Academic Achievement Award. The society noted his "vast array of accomplishments and contributions … to the economics discipline, to the other social and natural sciences, and to the Hispanic and other minority communities." The award was presented at the society's annual meeting in New Orleans in January.

Heghnar Watenpaugh, associate professor of art history, has received the Ailsa Bruce Mellon Senior Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The fellowship includes a residence at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., from September 2008 through May 2009. Watenpaugh will be at work on her next book, The City and Its Reverse: Performing Space and Gender in Islamic Urbanism.

Jamal Abedi, professor of education, is the 2008 recipient of the California Educational Research Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is given each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to educational research, evaluation, or measurement over a long and illustrious career. The award will be presented at the association's meeting in December.

Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the Graduate School of Management, has been named one of the 2008 "Women Who Mean Business" by the Sacramento Business Journal. Biggart will receive the honor at a ceremony on June 20.

Scott Sigmund Gartner, professor of political science, and Alan Olmstead, professor of economics, have received the 2008 Thomas Jefferson Prize from the Society for the History of the Federal Government for their book, Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition. The reference book, published in its first edition in 2006, has won half a dozen other honors, including a Booklist Editor's Choice Award and selection as a History News Network Book of the Month.

The UC Multi-Campus Research Group in the History and Culture of Late Antiquity received the 2007 American Philosophical Association's Prize for Scholarly Outreach. The committee includes Emily Albu, an associate professor of Spanish, along with faculty from UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Riverside and UC Santa Barbara. The group has worked since 1999 to develop course materials about the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity and Islam for 6th- and 7th-grade social studies teachers in California.

Mary Sandy, executive director of the School of Education's Cooperative Research and Extension Services program, has been appointed to the board of the California Council on Teacher Education. The council is a nonprofit organization devoted to improving continuing education for teachers and administrators.

English professor Timothy Morton will discuss "Animals, Vegetables, Minerals and Other Alien Beings" as the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment in Great Britain in July. Morton's most recent book is Ecology Without Nature, which will be published in Chinese in 2009.

Jay Mechling, professor of American studies, and Keith Watenpaugh, associate professor of religious studies, were invited speakers at "Scouting: A Centennial History Symposium." The academic conference was held at Johns Hopkins University in February. Mechling spoke on "Christianity, Nature Religion, and the Confusion of Tongues in the Boy Scouts of America." Watenpaugh's talk was titled "Middle Eastern Scouting and Middle-Class Modernity, 1910-1946."

Colin Milburn, assistant professor of English, is cited in an April 2008 essay in the prestigious journal Nature about a Nanotechnology, Literature and Society conference held late last year at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The essay, titled "The Literature of Promises," credits Milburn's writing with turning assumptions about nanotechnology and science fiction "inside out."

Andrew Hargadon, associate professor of management, will speak on financing research and development and new business in green technology at the Transatlantic Green Platform conference in Le Baule, France in June. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be a keynote speaker at the meeting.

Malaquias Montoya, a professor of Chicana/o studies and art, was commissioned by the California Latino Legislative Caucus to design a silkscreen for the caucus's annual "Spirit Awards." The awards were given to 14 successful Latinos from a variety of fields at a May 5 ceremony on the capitol steps. This year's honorees, who included renowned teacher Jaime Escalante and football star Jim Plunkett, each took home a framed print of the work, titled "El Cantor," which features a man playing a guitar against a backdrop of farmland. Also, Stanford University honored Montoya at an April 18 luncheon following inauguration of his newly restored mural on the campus. Montoya created the mural for El Centro Chicano at Stanford almost 30 years ago. He and his son, Maceo, also an artist, worked together to restore the mural.

The Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics received multiple honors at the 2007 American Agricultural Economics Association meeting. Professor James Wilen delivered the AAEA Fellows Address. Professor Julian Alston took home a Quality of Communication Award. Farm finance management specialist Steven Blank received a Distinguished Extension/Outreach Program citation. Professor emeritus Hoy Carman was a finalist for the Best Paper Contribution in Communication of an Agricultural and Food Management Business Theory award. Postdoctoral research George Dyer, assistant professor Stephen Boucher and professor Edward Taylor won an honorable mention in a competition for outstanding American Journal of Agricultural Economics article for their paper, "Subsistence Response to Market Shocks."

Donald Donham, professor of anthropology, has been named editor of American Ethnologist, the journal of the American Ethnological Society. Founded in 1842 to foster "inquiries generally connected with the human race," the society is the oldest U.S. anthropological organization.

Omnia El Shakry, assistant professor of history, received a 2007 Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for her study of Islam, modernity and the construction of self in 20th century Egypt. The fellowship supports assistant and associate professors in the humanities who have well-designed, careful plans for new research that will advance their fields.

Psychology professor Gail Goodman received the American Psychological Association's 2008 Urie Bronfenbrenner Award. The award recognizes an individual whose work over a lifetime career has contributed to the science of developmental psychology and benefit of society.

Noah Guynn, associate professor of French and Italian, won the 2007 Martin Stevens Award for the best new article in early drama studies from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. The society is an academic association of scholars interested in medieval and Renaissance drama.

Fourteen UC Davis graduate students recently received Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Awards in recognition of their contributions to teaching and learning. The awards were presented by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef and Jeffery Gibeling, dean of Graduate Studies, during a May 1 ceremony in the Walter A. Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center. Award recipients and their respective departments are: Cassandra Brown, anthropology; Patrick Dragon, mathematics; Benjamin Fell, civil and environmental engineering; Laura Hall, nutritional biology; Mary Frances Keller, entomology; Vannarith Leang, chemical engineering and materials science; Laurence Lemaire, French; Eric O'Brien, English; Christopher Schaberg, English; Brant Schumaker, epidemiology; Lisa Sperber, English; Eva Strawbridge, applied mathematics; Diana Webb, mathematics; and Hongtao Xie, biomedical engineering. This award program is sponsored by the Graduate Council, the Office of Graduate Studies and the Teaching Resources Center.

Prasant Mohapatra, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Computer Science, has been named an Outstanding Engineering Alumnus by the Penn State College of Engineering. Mohapatra received his award recently at the Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State campus. Established in 1966, the award is the highest honor bestowed by the College. The Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award recognizes graduates who have reached exceptional levels of professional achievement.

Jonathan Heritage, professor of electrical and computer engineering has been awarded the 2008 R.W. Wood Prize by the Optical Society of America. Established in 1975, the prize recognizes an outstanding discovery, scientific or technical achievement or invention in the field of optics. The prize is endowed by Xerox.

Professor Kenneth Shackel, Department of Plant Sciences, has been named a National Academies Education Fellow in the Life Sciences for the 2007–2008 academic year. Shackel was honored for his participation in the 2007 National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology in Madison, Wisc., which brought together teams from 13 research universities for several days to focus on enhancing undergraduate education for future research biologists. Shackel's research interests are primarily in the area of plant water relations.

Jiming Jiang, professor of statistics, has been elected as a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in recognition of his outstanding research and professional contributions. The new fellows will be recognized and presented with a plaque during the World Congress in Probability and Statistics in Singapore, July 14-19.

Two postdocs recently received the 2008 Excellence in Postdoctoral Research Awards in recognition of their vital role in maintaining the reputation of research at UC Davis. Award recipients, their postdoctoral mentors and their respective departments are Rosa Rivero, professor Eduardo Blumwald, Department of Plant Sciences, and Zhigang Wang, professor Kazuo Yamazaki, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. The awards were presented by Jeffery Gibeling, dean of Graduate Studies, and Abhinav Bhushan, chair of the Postdoctoral Scholars Association, during a May 28 ceremony on campus.

Doctoral student Damian Parr won a $2,500 scholarship for organic sustainable agriculture from Annie's Homegrown, an organic food company. Parr, co-founder of the UC Davis Students for Sustainable Agriculture, is studying agricultural and environmental education.