History professor Carol Lansing’s lifetime of distinguished work has earned her a prestigious honor: She was named a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America — a status given to fewer than 5% of the organization’s members. Lansing’s research is aimed at understanding of life in the Middle Ages, with a special focus on gender issues in the pre-Renaissance era. She has made significant contributions to the fields of religious, gender and political history, as well as to the emerging field of the history of emotions.
Driven by a desire to understand and foster equity in classrooms and in schools, Sarah Roberts, an assistant professor of mathematics education at The Gevirtz School, has been awarded an Early CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant will support her project to provide multilingual learners with cognitively rich grade level instruction while also engaging students in disciplinary rich language.
John Harter, an assistant professor of materials, also has received an NSF Early CAREER award — the highest honor given by the foundation to junior faculty — in support of his cutting-edge research in quantum materials science and educational activities. Harter conducts experimental work with odd-parity superconductivity, which could play a key role in the development of quantum computers.
Professors Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and Toshiro Tanimoto were named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows — a prestigious honor for those who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or for creative ability in the arts that comes with a significant grant intended to support their research and creative projects for a year. Ogbechie, a historian of art and architecture, will explore how curators and art historians represent African artists and artworks in the discourse of global contemporary art; Tanimoto, an earth scientist, will research a geophysical technique for estimating the ice melt at various locations in polar regions.
Somayeh Dodge, an assistant professor of geography, uses movement to investigate changes and feedback between groups and their environment — from local wildfire response to the behavior of big cats in Thailand. And it’s earned her some prestigious honors. In recognition of her research to study movement as an indicator and model of change, and her work to advance Geographic Information Science education, Dodge won a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award and an Emerging Scholar Award from the Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.
Chemist Joan-Emma Shea, economist Shelly Lundberg and chemical engineer Michael Doherty have been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, bringing to 45 the number of UC Santa Barbara faculty members named fellows of the prestigious organization. Doherty, the Mellichamp Chair in Process Systems Engineering, has particular interest in conceptual design of chemical process systems. The Leonard Broom Professor of Demography, Lundberg examines the sources of educational inequality and of gender gaps in education, as well as the status of women in the economics profession. Shea is associate dean of science and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry; her areas of specialization include physical chemistry, biomedical sciences, and biology-inspired chemistry and physics.
For his work to design a probabilistic computer to solve computational problems faster and more efficiently, Kerem Çamsari, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research. One of only 32 junior faculty nationwide selected in 2022, Çamsari will receive $510,000 over three years — funding he said will support postdoctorates and graduate students, chip fabrication and the costs of equipment needed to carry out the research.
