Humanities:

Tanya Sheehan, Asssistant Professor of Art History, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society and a Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature, at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.  In spring 2010, she will be in residency working on a new book which takes a critical look at ideas about race in early photographic humor.

Paola Tartakoff, Asssistant Professor of Jewish Studies and History, is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2009- 2010, for her research project on Jewish conversion to Christianity focusing on the inquisitorial prosecution of Jews and converts in the Crown of Aragon during the century prior to the massacres and forced conversions of 1391.  

Social and Behavioral Sciences:

John Abela, Professor of Psychology, received the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Independent Researcher Award 2008.  The goal of the current two-year, multi-wave, longitudinal study is to examine the role of cognitive factors in the etiology of depression during childhood. It will be the largest, most methodologically sophisticated study to examine theories of cognitive vulnerability to depression in children.

Alan Leslie, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, has been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the NJ Psychological Association's 2008 Distinguished Researcher Award for his work on early cognitive development. He is a pioneer in the field of social cognition and the child’s “theory of mind,” and a co-discoverer of the theory of mind impairment in autism.

Physical and Mathematical Sciences:

Valery Kiryukhin, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel research award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Award winners are honored for their outstanding research record and invited to work in Germany. Kiryukhin will be working with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute to understand the mechanisms underlying functional properties of solids and and to help design new solid state systems.

Alex Morozov, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, with a joint appointment in BioMaps, has won a Sloan Foundation fellowship. These two-year prestigious fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. He also received funding for his first grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health.

Life Sciences:

Megerditch (Mike) Kiledjian, Professor and Co-associate Chair of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, received a National Institutes of Health grant to study the regulation of gene expression and its implications in mental retardation and a Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy award to study the mechanism of action for a potential therapeutic compound for the treatment of Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

Eileen White, Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and Associate Director for Basic Science, The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, has received the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research 2009 Research Development Award for work on Multidisciplinary Research Network Targeting the Autophagy Pathway for Cancer Therapy with a team of scientists, clinicians, and physicians from Rutgers, CINJ, UMDNJ, and Princeton University.