Four Dietrich School faculty members have received 2024 Chancellor's Awards in recognition of their accomplishments in public service, research, and teaching.
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences alumnus, Zhen Liu has received the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship. Zhen graduated from Pitt in 2015 with his PhD. There are 126 researchers who are awarded this fellowship each year. It includes a 2-year $75,000 fellowship to advance research. Liu is now an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota.
Gurudev Dutt, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences has received a $2M grant from the Templeton Foundation and $470K from the Sloan Foundation to better understand the fundamental nature of gravity.
Fernando Tormos-Aponte, an associate professor of Sociology in the Dietrich School had his research on the growth of science advocacy, specifically with climate change, referenced in a recent Nature article.
You can read the article here.
He and his colleagues work was also reported in Scientific American in 2020.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced the recipients of grants totaling $2.5 million. The University of Pittsburgh is one of 10 schools who will be receiving $250,000 for a two-year seed grant to help make and implement plans that will help advance more diverse and equitable doctoral STEM programs. After the two-year period universities will be eligible to apply for a four-year, $1.4 million implementation grant from Sloan. That grant will also include scholarship funds for students in those STEM departments.
Lorraine Blatt, a Graduate Student Researcher with the University’s Psychology Department was recently published in the American Academy of Pediatrics for her study on structural racism. Blatt used Allegheny County as her research grounds to see how structural racism leads to fewer opportunities for children today. The study explored how these systems of racism often lead to higher accounts of poverty, poor healthcare, and fewer resources for education as well as other detrimental outcomes.
Dietrich School faculty members from the Departments of Communication and Linguistics are among the winners of the first round of funding for the Year of Discourse and Dialogue.
Drawing on their decades of expertise and field research, Dietrich School Distinguished Professor of Sociology Kathleen M. Blee and her coauthors connect the dots from the ideas and customs of the extremist white supremacist movement they’ve tracked directly to the disinformation-fueled rage of the Capitol insurrectionists.
Read the article here.
Gurudev Dutt, associate professor in the Dietrich School's Department of Physics and Astronomy, is among 11 physics researchers whose innovative projects were selected for funding by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.
Kay Brummond, a professor in the Dietrich School's Department of Chemistry, reflected on the impact of the publication Organic Syntheses in an editorial that was co-published by nine chemistry journals.
