Accolades

A University team placed fifth in the 2006 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. Chicago team members David Coley, a third-year in Mathematics, Junehyuk Jung, a second-year undeclared, and Zhiwei Calvin Lin, a second-year in Mathematics, received $200 each and the team received $5,000. Lin also received honorable mention in the Individuals category.

Princeton University placed first, followed by Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Toronto. A total of 3,640 students from 508 colleges and universities in Canada and the United States participated in the competition. There were teams from 402 institutions.

The competition began in 1938 and is named for William Lowell Putnam, a Harvard alumnus who believed in healthy intellectual rivalries between colleges.

Eugene Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the Graduate School of Business, has been chosen as the 2007 recipient of the Fred Arditti Innovation Award given by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center for Innovation.

“The award celebrates innovation that through practical application has had a positive impact on the economic well-being of individuals, industry or a nation,” stated the announcement from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world’s largest derivatives exchange.

Fama’s empirical and theoretical work on market efficiency has changed the way financial practitioners perceive markets. Recently he worked with former Chicago faculty member Kenneth French to develop the three-factor model to describe the tradeoff of risk for expected returns. The model posits that market, size and value risk factors best explain average stock returns. The model is widely used both in academic research and by practitioners to guide asset allocation decisions and to evaluate portfolio performance.

Fama has published approximately 100 articles related to portfolio theory and asset pricing, corporate finance, microeconomics and macroeconomics, including the book, The Theory of Finance, which he co-wrote with the late Merton Miller, a former Chicago GSB Professor and Nobel laureate.

The Arditti Award is named for the former chief economist of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, who was instrumental in developing the exchange’s Eurodollar futures contract, the world’s most actively traded futures contract.

Shelli Frey, a graduate student in chemistry, is one of 12 students to receive a 2007 Student Research Achievement Award from the Biophysical Society.

Frey was the sole winner in the student competition for the Structure and Assembly Subgroup at the society’s 51st annual meeting in Baltimore in March.

Frey works in the laboratory of Ka Yee Lee, Associate Professor in Chemistry and the College. In her research, Frey explores the interaction between polymers and cell membranes in the context of using polymers to seal membranes whose structural integrity has been compromised, explained Lee.

EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association that advances higher education through information technology, has presented its Leadership Award to Greg Jackson, Vice President & Chief Information Officer. The Leadership Award is the highest individual honor offered by EDUCAUSE, which includes 16,500 members at more than 2,100 colleges, universities and educational organizations, and 200 corporations.

The award recognizes leaders whose work has had significant, positive impact on the contributions of information technology to higher education. EDUCAUSE cited Jackson “for perceptive, frank analysis of complex issues and strong advocacy for IT in higher education,” and will make a $3,000 donation in his name to a scholarship or charity of his choice.

Jackson has been a member of the Board of Directors for EDUCAUSE and other national computing infrastructure and higher educational organizations. He was instrumental in creating the Research University CIO Conclave, a forum for research university CIOs. Jackson also has chaired the National Planning and Policy Council of Internet2, an advanced networking consortium, and has served on higher education advisory boards for Dell, Sun, Apple, Microsoft and Gateway.

Monica Peek, Assistant Professor in Medicine, has been appointed to the African American National Advisory Council of Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization, a grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists, which has funded basic clinical and translational breast cancer research for the past 25 years.

The African American National Advisory Council assists the organization in identifying gaps in breast health and breast cancer research, education, screening and training in the African-American population. Council members serve three years and help the organization plan strategies to decrease disparities in breast cancer mortality rates in minority populations.

Peek’s research focuses on diabetes and breast cancer screening and health disparities related to chronic disease management and preventative health care. She also studies how race and culture impact patient/provider relationships, shared decision-making and diabetes health outcomes.

Robert Rosenfield, Professor in Medicine and Pediatrics and Section Head Emeritus of Pediatric Endocrinology, has been elected president of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society.

Rosenfield, Director of the Pediatric Endocrinology Training Program, is a project leader of a polycystic ovary syndrome research initiative in a Specialized Cooperative Center Program in reproductive research.

The Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society promotes “the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge of endocrine and metabolic disorders from conception through adolescence.”

Steven Shevell, a Professor in Ophthalmology & Visual Science and the College and a leading researcher in human vision specializing in color vision, has been elected President of the Vision Sciences Society.

Shevell, also a Professor in Psychology and Chair of the department’s graduate program in Integrative Neuroscience, is the founding associate editor of the Journal of Vision, senior editor of Vision Research and the editor of the Optical Society of America’s most recent edition of The Science of Color.

The Vision Sciences Society is an international organization devoted to understanding how people see. While the eye is an essential part of the visual system, many basic visual functions, such as depth perception, tracking a moving object, discriminating different shapes or recognizing faces, depend on neural processes in the brain.

The Vision Sciences Society brings together scientists from a broad range of disciplines and experimental approaches to advance and integrate knowledge of the neural systems in eye and brain that give the sense of vision.