NSM Pride: Awards and Honors
Share News of Your Achievements
NSM is proud of the achievements of our outstanding alumni, students, staff and faculty. Submit news of your awards, new jobs and honors to breakthrough@nsm.uh.edu or contact Kathy Major at ksmajor@uh.edu or 713-743-4023.
Alumni
Jaime González (Biology ’96, M.Ed. ’07) is the 2019 recipient of NSM’s Distinguished Alumni Award. This award is bestowed upon NSM alumni for exceptional achievement in their professional field, involvement in the community, and demonstrated innovative change to improve the lives of others through their work. González, the Houston Urban Conservation Programs Manager at The Nature Conservancy in Texas, is an award-winning, Houston-based conservationist, environmental educator, naturalist, convener, change agent, and communicator. Related Article
Brendon Hillebrand (Computer Science, ’18) is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. He will serve as an English Teaching Assistant in Taiwan. The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build relations between the people of the U.S. and the people of other countries.
Students
Vidushi Adlakha (Ph.D. Student, Physics) received a UH Teaching Excellence Award in the Graduate Teaching Assistant category. This award is given to graduate students in recognition of outstanding teaching.
Gustavo Aguilar (Ph.D. Student, Computer Science) was selected as a 2019 Snap Research Fellow. This fellowship, administered by Snap Inc., creator of the social media platform Snapchat, comes with a $10,000 award and a full-time paid internship. The fellowship program recognizes outstanding students carrying out research in areas relevant to Snap Inc.’s mission.
Parisa Ansari and Ya Zhou (Ph.D. Students, Chemistry) and Rabin Dahal and Geethal Amila Gamage (Ph.D. Students, Physics) received C. W. Chu Scholarships for the 2019-2020 academic year. Each student will receive a $1,500 award. The selections were made by the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH (TcSUH), and these students are all conducting research in one of TcSUH’s multidisciplinary groups.
Kayla Bicol and Duong Nguyen (Graduate Students, Mathematics) served as co-chairs of the organizing committee for the third annual Texas Women in Mathematics Symposium, a two-day event that brought 70 female mathematicians together for networking, talks and professional development. The 2018 event was hosted at UH. Yuliya Gorb, associate professor of mathematics, served as the faculty advisor.
Diana Bui and Stephanie Huffman (Biology Majors) are recipients of the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. The scholarship enables them to participate in faculty-led international programs. In early summer, Bui will go to Bologna, Italy, and Huffman to Cadiz, Spain. The students will receive up to $5,000 to apply toward their program costs.
Naghmeh Hassanzadeh Khayyat and Shreesti Shrestha (Ph.D. Students, Biology & Biochemistry) tied for third place in the UH Graduate Research Showcase Poster Competition.
Hannah Locke and Noah Luecke (Ph.D. Students, Biology) received one-year, $8,000 Texas Ecolab grants to fund their research. Locke is studying the connection between the microorganisms found in soil and the eating habits of herbivores. She also tied for first place in the UH Graduate Research Showcase 3-Minute Thesis Competition. Luecke wants to understand how the microbial communities contained in grassland soils affect a plant’s ability to thrive under different rainfall conditions.
Aria Mansouri Tehrani (Ph.D. Student, Chemistry) received the inaugural Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award at UH NSM Commencement. His dissertation, entitled “Development of Sustainable Superhard Materials,” is centered on using machine learning approaches to discover superhard materials, and combines both theoretical and experimental work. He has published nine papers and presented his work at many conferences, including a prestigious Gordon Research Conference. Mansouri Tehrani’s mentor is Jakoah Brgoch. He received a certificate and $1,000 cash award.
A team of five Ph.D. and M.S. graduate students from the Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences won first place in the Imperial Barrel Award Program of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Gulf Coast Section competition. The winning UH team members are Jacob Miller (M.S.), Patrick Chandler (M.S.), Aydin Shahtakhtinskiy (Ph.D., Team Captain), Spencer Fuston (Ph.D.), and Andrew Stearns (M.S.). The dataset they presented was the North Carnarvon basin, northwest Australia. They advance to a final, global competition held at the Annual AAPG Convention in San Antonio on May 18. The global competition includes the all first-place teams from the sectional competitions.
Debora Mroczek and Brian Vu (Physics Majors) are recipients of Barry Goldwater Scholarships. The Scholarship Program is designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the preeminent undergraduate award of its type in these fields.
Ujwal Patil (Ph.D. Student, Biochemistry) was a finalist for the 2018 MilliporeSigma Life Science Award in Bioseparations. The MilliporeSigma Life Science Award was offered in three categories: bioseparations, food & beverage safety, and tumor biology. In each category, four students were selected, with one student awarded a grand prize of $10,000, and the remaining three finalists receiving a $2,000 award. Patil develops methods for purifying therapeutically useful proteins, such as antibodies used in immunotherapies.
Maya Reese (Ph.D. Student, Biology) was awarded the 2018 Tschinkel Ant Natural History Research Grant. This $2,500 award is administered by the International Union for the Study of Social Insects in support of graduate student research on the basic natural history and biology of ants. Reese studies the colony behavior of western harvester ants.
Amirreza (Reza) Shirani (Ph.D. Student, Computer Science) received a “Highly Commended Paper Award” at the 2018 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement in Oulu, Finland. His research, using a branch of artificial intelligence called natural language processing to sort and classify questions relating to software development, was conducted in collaboration with Amin Alipour, assistant professor of computer science.
Stephanie Suarez (Ph.D. Student, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) and Jose Daniel Velazco-Garcia (Ph.D. Student, Computer Science) were selected as recipients of prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Both are in graduate programs at UH. A third NSM student, Erin Miller, received her B.S. in geology in December 2018 and is now pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi. The NSF GRF program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions. Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees.
Ziping Ye (Ph.D. Student, Physics) received a Best Graduate Student Presentation Award at the 2018 Texas Section of the American Physical Society Meeting. This award was for his research on the use of dark matter detectors to study neutrinos coming from supernova events.
Faculty
NSM’s John C. Butler Excellence in Teaching Award: Melahat Almus (Instructional Associate Professor, Mathematics) and Thomas Teets (Assistant Professor, Chemistry) are the 2019 recipients. Established in memory of former NSM Dean John Butler, the award recognizes faculty members who best engage and challenge their students and who share their enthusiasm for the subject matter they teach.
Andre Cardoso Barato (Assistant Professor, Physics) was honored by the American Physical Society as an Outstanding Referee. The designation recognizes scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals.
Eric Bittner (Moores Professor, Chemistry) was honored with the 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award from Valparaiso University.
Albert Cheng (Professor, Computer Science) has been appointed as an Associate Editor of the journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
Olafs Daugulis (Robert A. Welch Chair, Chemistry) and Zhifeng Ren (M.D. Anderson Chair Professor, Physics) were included among a list of scientists whose work has been most often cited by their fellow researchers. The Clarivate Analytics list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2018 identifies scientists and social scientists from around the world who have demonstrated significant influence through publication of highly cited papers during the last decade, defined as ranking in the top 1 percent by citations in a specific field and year.
Preethi Gunaratne (Moores Professor, Biology & Biochemistry) was named a Moores Professor at the 2019 UH Faculty Excellence Awards Dinner. The Moores Professorship is a five-year renewable award given to faculty who are outstanding in teaching, research and service. Recipients receive a $10,000 annual stipend.
Shuhab Khan (Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) and recent Ph.D. graduate Unal Okyay were the first place recipients of the prestigious 2019 John I. Davidson President’s Award for Practical Papers from the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
Richard Meisel (Assistant Professor, Biology & Biochemistry) received a five-year, $1.2 million National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study sex determination of house flies. Outside the class of mammals, sex determination operates differently in other animals. He wants to understand why something so essential and important as sex determination is not done the same way across all animals.
Ognjen Miljanic (Associate Professor, Chemistry) has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the United Kingdom’s professional society dedicated to advancing excellence in the chemical sciences. Entry to Fellow status is granted to professional chemists who have made significant contributions to advancing their field.
NSM’s Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Research: Thomas Teets (Assistant Professor, Chemistry) is the 2019 recipient of this award recognizing assistant professors who have demonstrated great potential in research and in scholarship by virtue of the exceptional quality of their contributions.
Thomas Teets (Assistant Professor, Chemistry) received a five-year, $589,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study the interaction of light with organometallic compounds. His work focuses on synthetic strategies for producing photoactive organometallic compounds.
Don Van Nieuwenhuise (Instructional Professor and Director of Professional Geoscience Programs, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) was selected as president-elect by the membership of the Gulf Coast Section of SEPM, known as GCSSEPM. SEPM, formerly the Society for Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists from which its acronym was derived, is now the Society for Sedimentary Geology. It is one of the largest international societies promoting the advancement of sedimentary and stratigraphic research.
Chad Wayne (Instructional Professor, Biology & Biochemistry) received the 2019 Outstanding Faculty Award from the UH Alumni Association Foundation. The award, presented at the 65th Annual Alumni Awards Gala, recognizes UH faculty members who excel in both teaching and in building a sense of community among students. The award highlights their accomplishments and careers, which have brought credit to the University.
Jonny Wu (Assistant Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) received a five-year, $568,309 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to tackle reconstruction of Panthalassa-Pacific Plates. The work will rely upon data gathered by tomography, a 3D image of the earth produced by measuring natural waves of earthquake energy moving across the mantle. Related Article
UH Faculty Excellence Awards: NSM faculty members brought home honors for excellence in the areas of teaching, mentoring, research and scholarship. The awards, given each year at the UH Faculty Excellence Awards Dinner, are among the highest honors bestowed by the University. NSM award recipients include:
Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creativity – Associate Professor
Claudia Ratti, Physics
UH presents two awards at the associate professor rank to individuals who have who have established a growing record of outstanding research, scholarship or creative contributions, and who are emerging leaders in their field.
Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award
Jakoah Brgoch, Chemistry
The award acknowledges faculty who are making a significant impact in their field by supporting and mentoring undergraduate students in research and scholarship endeavors and who have demonstrated at least five years of mentorship involvement.
Teaching Excellence Career Award
Lowell Wood, Physics
One Career Award is given each year to a faculty member who has demonstrated excellence in teaching over the course of their career at UH. The recipient must have been on the UH faculty at for at least 20 years.
Teaching Excellence Award – Provost’s Core
Donna Pattison, Biology & Biochemistry
This award is given to faculty in recognition of outstanding teaching in the core curriculum.
Teaching Excellence Award
Vaughn Climenhaga, Mathematics
This award is given to tenured or tenure-track professors who have demonstrated excellence in teaching.
Teaching Excellence Award – Instructor/Clinical
Daniel Hauptvogel, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
This award is given in recognition of outstanding teaching by faculty instructors, clinical faculty, research faculty, artist affiliates, and lecturers.
Teaching Excellence Award – Group Teaching
Two NSM groups were recognized with Group Teaching Awards. The award recognizes faculty who demonstrate a strong commitment to teaching and student success, who have worked together collaboratively to improve student outcomes. NSM swept this category!
Galapago! Teaching Team
Ricardo Azevedo, Biology & Biochemistry
Ann Cheek, Biology & Biochemistry
Tony Frankino, Biology & Biochemistry
Andrew Hamilton, Dean’s Office
Marc Hanke, Honors College
Rebecca Zufall, Biology & Biochemistry
Geophysical Field Camp Team
Shuhab Khan, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Chang Li, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Will Sager, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Rob Stewart, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Guoquan “Bob” Wang, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Jingjing Zong, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
