Faculty

Three researchers at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering have won Faculty Early Career Development awards from the National Science Foundation, its most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. The awards went to assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering Adrienne Stiff-Roberts, Jungsang Kim, and Sule Ozev. Each award is expected to total $400,000 over five years.

Christian R.H. Raetz, George Barth Geller professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry, was one of 72 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Two Duke faculty members were elected to the Institute of Medicine: Peter C. Agre, MD, vice chancellor of science and technology and professor of cell biology, and James O. McNamara, MD, Carl R. Deane professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology.

David Steinmetz, Amos Ragan Kearns professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an international organization of the world’s leading scholars, scientists, artists, business people and political leaders.

Erich Jarvis, associate professor of neurobiology, has been selected as a recipient of a 2005 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Pioneer Award. The award -- which provides an unrestricted grant of $500,000 per year for five years -- was established "to encourage highly innovative approaches to biomedical research that have the potential to lead to significant advances in human health," according to the institute.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the 2006 Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences to Stuart L. Pimm, Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at the Nicholas School, for his groundbreaking work on species extinction and conservation. Only six Heineken Prizes are presented biennially and it is among the most prestigious international awards given in the fields of history, medicine, biochemistry and biophysics, environmental sciences, cognitive science, and art.

Henry Petroski, Aleksander S. Vesoc professor of civil engineering, is the recipient of the 2006 Washington Award for his efforts to make engineering practice and theory understandable to the general public. The award—one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country—is conferred by the Western Society of Engineers upon an engineer whose professional attainments “preeminently advance the welfare of human kind.”

William H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and a James B. Duke professor, has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). AGU Fellows are scientists who have attained acknowledged eminence in one or more branches of geophysics. The number of Fellows elected each year is limited to no more than 0.1 percent of the union’s membership.

The National Academy of Sciences’ committee on African-American History has chosen Arlie O. Petters, mathematical astronomer and professor of mathematics and physics, to be among two to three outstanding individuals for 2006 to be inducted into “A Portrait Collection of The National Academies of African-Americans in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.”

Norman L. Christensen, professor of ecology and founding dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, has been elected president of the 9,000-member Ecological Society of America (ESA), beginning August 2006. The ESA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of scientists founded in 1915 to promote ecological sciences and raise policymakers’ and the public’s awareness of the importance of ecology in everyday life.