The Dish Stanford people on the move and in the spotlight

Priya Satia

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the nation’s leading private supporter of humanities and social sciences scholarship, has awarded PRIYA SATIA a year-long ACLS Fellowship for her research Guns: The British Imperial State and the Industrial Revolution.

Satia, an associate professor of history, uses the British gun industry to investigate the relationship between 18th-century war and economic development. Her research focuses on the Galton firm of Birmingham, England’s largest gun firm serving both the state and private clients, including slave traders. The Galton family were Quakers who wrestled publicly about the ethics of gun making, highlighting 18th-century notions about war and the economy. Satia, who will be on sabbatical, also received a 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for the project.

ANDREW BRICKER, a doctoral candidate in English, has received a year-long Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his research, titled “Producing and Litigating Satire, 1670-1760.” Bricker’s dissertation reveals how statutory and common law developed at the end of the 17th century and the 18th century to target Augustan satire. Writers and booksellers evaded these legal advances by devising new rhetorical and bibliographic strategies that helped stymie potential prosecutions. Bricker was also recently awarded a Rare Book School fellowship.

—LISA TREI, School of Humanities and Sciences

Ernestine Fu

ERNESTINE FU, a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering, and MARTIN FISCHER, professor of civil and environmental engineering, have been chosen to receive one of the first Schmidt-MacArthur Fellowships.

The fellowship is an international postgraduate fellowship on the circular economy for design, engineering and business students.

Funded by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the Schmidt Family Foundation, the fellowships are designed to challenge postgraduate students and their academic mentors to innovate for a circular economy.

Each student receives a fellowship to help him or her undertake a circular economy innovation project with access to an online learning platform, mentoring support from his or her university and an invitation to a week-long intensive summer school in London in June. Fellowship recipients will share their learning experiences and developing projects on the MacArthur Foundation website.

On the foundation website, Fu explains, “I am a student at Stanford University pursuing a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering. I recently completed my undergraduate and master’s studies in the fields of energy strategy, management science and engineering. With the support of the Schmidt-MacArthur Fellowship, I am excited to create a class focused on circular economy at Stanford, to be taught this upcoming academic year with Professor Martin Fischer.”

Fu has been widely profiled in the media for her work as an entrepreneur, including in Forbes and the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website, the “circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere.”

Megan Swezey Fogarty (by Joy Leighton)

At the annual Student Affairs Service Awards breakfast last week, MEGAN SWEZEY FOGARTY received the Margaret Ann Fidler Award for Distinguished Service in Student Affairs.

Fogarty, who first joined Stanford’s staff in 1986, became the director of fellowships and postgraduate public service at the Haas Center for Public Service in 2008.

The award, named for MARGARET ANN FIDLER, former associate vice provost for administration in Student Affairs, recognizes those who “demonstrate extraordinary dedication to their work and the mission of the university and whose work reflects integrity and a sincere belief in the value of teamwork and collaboration.”

The name of the winner is kept secret – revealed only after the citation has been read aloud to the audience. Fidler, who retired in 2001, presented the award.

Fogarty, who was sitting in the audience, said she was trying to figure out the identity of this year’s winner as Fidler read the citation:

“For a unique and natural ability to engage, to build effective relationships and to work collaboratively; for exemplary energy and passion as a champion for the student voice; for challenging and inspiring students to embrace service as an integral part of the Stanford experience; for personally embodying public service as key to a fulfilling life and to effective community involvement; and for ‘WOO’-ing Stanford students, staff and community partners.”

Fogarty said she was “utterly and totally surprised” to receive the award.

“I knew and looked up to Margaret Ann Fidler as both a student and young professional at Stanford,” she said. “To receive this award that honors her legacy is at once a deep honor and extremely humbling.”

Fogarty said “WOO-ing” refers to a “talent theme” identified by StrengthsQuest, a program – used by some units in Student Affairs – designed to help people use their talents to achieve personal and professional success. People strong in the WOO theme enjoy the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over.

Fogarty will join Fidler and previous winners of the award for lunch. She also will receive a $1,000 prize.

Thomas Bligaard, Stefan Hoeche, Juhao Wu

Three scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will receive Early Career Research Program grants from the U.S. Department of Energy for research to boost the peak power of X-ray laser pulses, model catalytic chemical reactions and build better simulations of particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

SLAC’s THOMAS BLIGAARD, STEFAN HOECHE and JUHAO WU were among 61 scientists selected from a pool of 770 applicants for the five-year grants, which were announced last week by the DOE Office of Science. Researchers receive about $500,000 per year for salary and research expenses.

The grants support the development of individual research programs of scientists who received their doctoral degrees up to 10 years earlier. Recipients must be full-time DOE national laboratory employees or tenure-track assistant or associate professors at a U.S. academic institution, and their research topics must fall within one of six Office of Science focus areas.

Bligaard, a senior staff scientist who joined SLAC’s SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis two years ago, works to improve computer modeling of chemical reactions involving catalysts. Catalysts speed up reactions without themselves being consumed in the process. They are essential for many industrial processes, including the large-scale production of fuels and other chemicals, and for reducing airborne pollutants.

The grant will be useful in constructing more sophisticated, comprehensive codes that encompass a broader range of variables in chemical reactions and better represent complex materials, he said.

Hoeche, a member of SLAC’s Particle Physics Theory Group, is also working on better simulations, but of a very different sort. He and his group are developing more precise simulations for researchers at the Large Hadron Collider.

“We’re providing a tool that bridges the gap between theory and experiment,” Hoeche said.

Wu, a staff scientist in the Accelerator Research Division who joined SLAC in 2002, is studying methods to increase the peak power of pulses at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) by more efficiently transforming its electron energy into X-rays. The LCLS is an X-ray free-electron laser, or XFEL, and its ultrabright, ultrashort X-ray laser pulses are generated when an electron beam from the lab’s linear accelerator traverses a sequence of alternating magnets in devices called undulators.

Read the entire press release on the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory website.

Alfred Spormann

ALFRED SPORMANN, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of chemical engineering, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of microbiology.

Spormann studies anaerobic microbes to understand the molecular and biochemical basis of unusual metabolism, as well as the triangular relationship between metabolism, population-level fitness and ecosystems-level niche construction. In particular, Spormann has been working to develop microbes able to produce “clean” methane as a potential grid-scale electrical storage technology.

The American Academy of Microbiology is a leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, the world’s oldest and largest life science organization. Its mission is to recognize scientists for outstanding contributions to microbiology and provide microbiological expertise in the service of science and the public.

—ANDREW MYERS, School of Engineering

David Labaree

AERA, the American Educational Research Association, recently honored three faculty members of the Graduate School of Education — DAVID LABAREE, RAY MCDERMOTT and SEAN REARDON — at its annual meeting in San Francisco.

Labaree, professor of education, was selected to be a 2013 AERA Fellow for his exceptional scholarly contributions to education research. Labaree explores the development of the American education system and the role this system plays in American society. He is the author of a number of award-winning books, including Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, The Trouble with Ed Schools and How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education.

At the AERA conference, Labaree also gave the 55th annual John Dewey Lecture. His talk, “College — What Is It Good For?” traced how the modern American university came into being, looking in particular at how this institution developed its basic form in the “improbable context of the United States in the 19th century.”

Ray McDermott

Education Professor McDermott was chosen to receive a lifetime achievement award for distinguished contributions to social contexts in education research. He also gave the keynote address to AERA’s Division G, the organization’s section devoted to the social contexts of education. His talk, “Changing Borders: Relocating Race, Ethnicity and Class,” addressed how the dynamics of power along racial and ethnic borders affect access to educational opportunity.

McDermott, an anthropologist whose 45-year career in education began as a classroom teacher in New York City, joined the GSE faculty in 1989. Much of his recent research has been centered on the intersection of education, social structure and political economy. He takes a broad interest in the analysis of human communication, the organization of school success and failure, and the history and use of various literacies around the world. His work includes studies of inner-city public schools, after-school classrooms and the function of information technologies in different cultures.

Sean Reardon

Reardon, also a professor of education, and ANDREW HO, who received his PhD from the GSE and is now assistant professor of education at Harvard, were chosen to receive AERA’s Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award for their paper, “Estimating Achievement Gaps from Test Scores Reported in Ordinal Proficiency Categories” in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics (JEBS). The award is given annually to recognize the highest quality of scholarship published in JEBS and three other AERA publications.

In the paper, Reardon and Ho present novel statistical methods that enable researchers to better use readily available test score data to estimate achievement gaps among student groups. In particular, they describe ways to more accurately estimate achievement gaps when only incomplete data are available.

— JONATHAN RABINOVITZ, Stanford Graduate School of Education