Hamparsum Bozdogan, Toby & Brenda McKenzie Professor in business in the Department of Statistics, Operations, and Management Science, delivered one of the invited lectures at the prestigious International Conference of the Turkish Statistical Association April 29-30 in Antalya, Turkey. The title of his invited talk was “Robust and Misspecification Resistant Model Selection in Regression Models with Information Complexity and the Genetic Algorithm.” He was one of the six invited speakers from the U.S., Japan, and Portugal. The conference was attended by 400 participants. For more information on the conference, click here.
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Associate Professor of Psychology Todd Freeberg has received a Fulbright Scholar grant to teach and do research at Daugavpils University in Latvia for the spring semester 2012. The award states Freeberg will spend five months at the Institute of Systematic Biology at Daugavpils University. Freeberg plans to teach a course in animal communication and further develop research collaboration with a colleague there. Freeberg’s research focuses on understanding the evolution of vocal complexity in a variety of northern European ‘Paridae’ species, which are birds closely related to our local chickadees and titmice. An official announcement of Fulbright Scholar grants will be made in the fall.
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Jeffrey Kovac, professor in the Department of Chemistry and president of the UT Knoxville chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, has been appointed to the national Committee of Judges for the Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards in Science. One of a committee of five, Kovac will serve from 2011 until 2013. The committee judges book entries that advance a scholarly interpretation of the natural sciences and mathematics. The winner of the annual award receives a $10,000 prize.
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School of Art Associate Professor Amy Neff has been invited to present a public lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the premier British center for studies in art history, at the University of London. Her lecture, “‘Visual Forms of Franciscan Pastoral Care: The Humble Man’s Wedding at Cana,” will take place on June 7. The Franciscan Order is often credited with introducing a new spirituality that encouraged a new humanism in late medieval art and culture. Her paper examines a specific case-study, in which the Franciscan contribution to the visual arts can be more rigorously evaluated. At the Courtauld, Neff also will meet with graduate students, speaking on her research-in-progress.
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Dan Roberts, professor of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology, was honored in February with an award from the Tennessee Junior Science and Humanities Symposium acknowledging his efforts to foster pre-collegiate research and science education throughout Tennessee. The award was presented as part of the annual Tennessee Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (TJSHS) held at UT Knoxville earlier this semester. Hap McSween, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, presented the award to Roberts and thanked him for his service as director of the TJSHS for four years (2007-2010) and for his service as chair of the scientific and educational component of the program in 2011, which involved chairing the panel of faculty who judged the students’ research papers and selected the award winners.
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Peter Tsai, research associate professor at UT’s Textiles and Nonwovens Development Center, has received the Fellow Member Award for 2011 by the American Filtration and Separations Society. The award honors individuals who have made superior contributions to the field. Tsai is an internationally recognized expert in filtration media. In 2006 he won UT’s Wheeley Award for excellence in technology transfer, and in 2009 he was recognized by the UT Research Foundation for the positive impact on society of the licensing of his technologies.
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Aleydis Van de Moortel, Lindsay Young Associate Professor of Classics, accepted an invitation from the University of Heidelberg to give a keynote lecture at the international conference, “‘Minoans’ and Others: Tracing Networks and Interaction in the Aegean,” in Heidelberg, Germany, in March. Van de Moortel spoke on the Middle Bronze Age boat she discovered at Mitrou, the important excavation in mainland Greece, which she directs under the join sponsorship of the University of Tennessee, and the Greek Archaeological Service.