The chancellor and the provost host the Early Career Awards Reception for 29 faculty members.

Dateline staff

Music professor and department chair Christopher Reynolds is the new president-elect of the American Musicological Society. He was one of two candidates who stood for election for president in the membership’s spring voting.

As president-elect, Reynolds gains a seat on the board of directors this November and begins his two-year term as president in November 2012. He is the editor of the AMS Studies in Music book series.

One of his UC Davis colleagues, Professor Anna Maria Busse Berger, who is completing a term as a director-at-large on the AMS board, commended Reynolds for achieving “something that hardly anybody has before him”: winning the AMS presidency as a Californian! She explained: “East Coast people have a huge advantage in the election.”

Reynolds is the second UC Davis music professor to serve as AMS president, the other being Jessie Ann Owens, dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, who led the society from 2000 to 2002, amid her long tenure at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

The department also boasts two AMS members who have received the society’s highest accolade, the designation “honorary” member: Owens in 2008 and Professor D. Kern Holoman in 2010.

Reynolds has been chair of the Department of Music since 2009 and previously served as chair from 1992 to 1996. He served as faculty chair in the College of Letters and Science from 1995 to 1996.

The American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, promotes “research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship.” Reynolds’ research centers on the Renaissance, musical influence and American music.

The society’s roster comprises 3,300 individual members and 1,200 institutional subscribers from 40 nations.

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Professor Zhe Chen, chair of the Department of Human and Community Development, has been elected a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

As an APS fellow, Chen becomes part of a distinguished group of peers whose work has influenced the field of psychological science in important and lasting ways, the association’s executive director wrote in an e-mail to Chen’s nominator.

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The Association for the Study of Food and Society recently presented its 2011 Book Award to Professor Carolyn de la Peña for Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda.

In its biannual recognition of an outstanding book about food, the association looks for exemplary research methods, novel theoretical insights and significant contributions to the study of food from a scholarly perspective.

De la Peña is a professor of American studies and director of the Humanities Institute. She published Empty Pleasures last year.

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The Institute of Food Technologists inaugurated a new achievement award this year, for sensory and consumer sciences, and Professor Emeritus Howard Schutz is one of the first two recipients.

Schutz founded the institute’s sensory division and served as the first chair.

His expertise is in taste and odor, preference measurement and methodology, and cognitive and context factors in food acceptance. He has worked on product development methods, consumer behavior, and attitudes toward food and nutrition, and food irradiation.

Schutz founded a UC Davis Extension certificate program for applied sensory science and consumer testing, and he continues to teach through the extension program.

A previous Laurels column noted another award winner at this year’s IFT meeting: Christine Bruhn, a Cooperative Extension consumer food marketing specialist, recipient of the Carl R. Fellers Award for service to the field of food science and technology.

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The American Society of Brewing Chemists recently presented its 2011 Award of Distinction to Charlie Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences in the Department of Food Science and Technology.

The award acknowledges exceptional lifetime achievement, contribution, and service to brewing and the brewing industry. Bamforth began his work in the brewing industry in 1978. Before coming to UC Davis in 1999, he was the deputy director-general of Brewing Research International, and research manager and quality assurance manager of Bass Brewers.

In addition to his faculty appointment at UC Davis, he serves as a special professor in the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham, England. He is a fellow of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling, the Society of Biology, and the International Academy of Food Science and Technology.

Bamforth is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists. His books include Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing, and Beer: Tap Into the Art and Science of Brewing.

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An international communications organization recently honored senior writer Kathy Keatley Garvey of the Department of Entomology for outstanding professional writing. At the same time, she received gold awards for two of her stories, one about the Franklin’s bumblebee and the other about a bee sculpture titled Miss Bee Haven.

The awards came from the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Life and Human Sciences, an international organization comprising communicators, educators and information technologists.

She scored gold in these categories:

• Newswriting — for “Saving Franklin’s Bumble Bee,” about the work of entomology professor Robbin Thorp
• Writing for a specialized publication — for “Miss Bee Haven,” about Donna Billick’s 6-foot-long sculpture in the Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven

Garvey received a silver award in photography, for a photo of a honeybee heading toward a tower of jewels (scroll down to Honing In).

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The Arbor Day Foundation recently notified Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi of UC Davis’ designation as a Tree Campus USA for 2010.

“This special distinction sets your campus apart from other schools and shows your commitment to encouraging students and university personnel to care for our planet’s tree resources,” Dan Lambe, the foundation’s vice president for programs, wrote in a May 12 letter to the chancellor.

On the Web

Campus Tree Walk

Tree Campus USA

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