Accolades

The European Association of Geochemistry will award the 2008 Houtermans Medal to cosmochemist Nicolas Dauphas in July at the Goldschmidt Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The association awards the Houtermans Medal for achievements by a scientist under the age of 35.

Dauphas, Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College, operates the Origins Laboratory, which he established in 2004. As a cosmochemist, he studies chemical elements and their many atomic variations in meteorites and other materials from Earth and space.

His wide-ranging interests include the origins of Earth’s atmosphere and what meteorites reveal about the formation of the planets, asteroids and comets. Dauphas also has received a 2007 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and the 2005 Nier Prize from the Meteoritical Society.

First awarded in 1990, the Houtermans Medal is named in honor of Friedrich Georg Houtermans, a Dutch-Austrian-German physicist. Houtermans established the principles for dating using the U-Pb method. In 1953, Houtermans and Claire Patterson published independent estimates of the age of the earth through U-Pb radiometric dating of meteorites (approximately 4.5 billion years).

Last fall, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) presented Sascha Ebeling, Assistant Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, with their Forschungspreis (Research Award).

Ebeling was honored for his 2005 Ph.D. dissertation, titled “The Transformation of Tamil Literature During the Nineteenth Century,” which also is the title of his forthcoming book, to be published in 2009.

The book is a social history of Tamil literary practices in South India during the high time of colonial influence, and it is the first monograph-length study of Tamil literature of the 19th century.

The Forschungspreis, which is Germany’s most prestigious award in the field of Oriental Studies, was presented to Ebeling during the 30th German Congress of Oriental Studies in Freiburg.

Wu Hung, the Harrie H. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History and the College, and Director of the Center on the Art of East Asia, was honored with the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award at the 2008 Annual Conference of the College Art Association.

In honoring the scholar of Chinese art, the association cited Wu’s combination of “rigorous, generous and innovative teaching and exemplary scholarship that has inspired a high-achieving generation of younger scholars, transforming the study of East Asian art.”

Amir Sufi, Assistant Professor of Finance in the Graduate School of Business, received the 2007 Brattle Prize for a distinguished paper published in The Journal of Finance. The award was presented earlier this year at the annual meeting of the American Finance Association.

Sufi was honored for his paper, “Information Asymmetry and Financing Arrangements: Evidence from Syndicated Loans,” which can be found at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/amir.sufi/Sufi_JF_2007.pdf.

Sufi is the ninth Chicago GSB faculty member to win the award since it was given in 1999. Last year, Joshua Rauh, Assistant Professor of Finance in the GSB, won the first-place Brattle Prize.

A member of the Chicago faculty since 2005, Sufi teaches courses in corporation finance.

David Wellbery, the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in Germanic Studies and the College, has been elected a “corresponding member” of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Founded in 1759, the Munich-based institution is one of the oldest science academies in the world. Each year, the academy appoints scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledge within their subjects. Many highly respected scholars have been fellows; among them are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Theodor Mommsen, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Albert Einstein and Max Weber.