For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent appointments, honors, presentations and grants include the following:

Appointments

George Watson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, has announced several new and continuing leadership appointments. In the dean’s office, Joann Browning has begun serving as senior associate dean for the arts, a position she previously held until her recent retirement, and Lauren Petersen, professor of art history, has been appointed interim associate dean for the humanities. New department chairs are John Courtright, communication; Greg Shelnutt, art and design; Karen Parker, sociology and criminal justice; Brian Bahnson, chemistry and biochemistry; and Maj. Brian Babcock-Lumish, ROTC and military science. Reappointed as department chairs are John Ernest, English; Ben Bruening, linguistics and cognitive science; and Ed Nowak, physics and astronomy. Acting or interim appointments are Wendy Bellion, acting director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture; Jorge Cubillos, acting chair of languages, literatures and cultures; and Tom Rocek, acting chair of anthropology. Browning’s appointment was effective Aug. 1; all others are effective Sept. 1.

Honors

Catherine Leimkuhler Grimes, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is one of three researchers nationwide to receive a 2017 Young Investigator Award from the ACS Infectious Diseases journal of the American Chemical Society. The recipients will make presentations at a symposium in their honor, to be held Aug. 23 at this year’s ACS national meeting in Washington, D.C. The award recognizes Grimes’ “foundational work … to decipher the molecular interactions between bacteria and our immune system,” according to the journal. Grimes has won numerous awards for her work, including her research on chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease and asthma. Earlier this year, she received a Sloan Research Fellowship. She was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2014, won the Cottrell Scholar Award in 2015 and received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2016.

UD students Kelsey Lona and Megan Wagner, both double majors in accounting and finance, have been selected to attend KPMG’s elite Global Advantage program. "The quality of our programs and instructional effort is what keeps our students in such high demand," said Scott Jones, UD accounting chairperson. "Keep up the good work!"

2017 marks the third year that the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics has sponsored the Academy of Management Organizational and Management Theory (OMT) Division Junior Faculty Consortium. Wendy Smith, associate professor of management and an OMT representative-at-large for the last three years, organized this Junior Faculty Consortium. Last year, Katalin Takacs Haynes, associate professor of management, served as a mentor in this forum. This year, Derron Bishop, assistant professor of management, will join as a participant. Smith said that the consortium will provide “great opportunities for both research feedback and networking connections.”

John D. M. Caldwell, senior assistant librarian and political papers archivist at the University of Delaware Library, was elected to the Steering Committee of the Congressional Papers Section of the Society of American Archivists for a two-year term, beginning August 2017. 

Typewriter: A Celebration of the Ultimate Writing Machine, a book coauthored by Peter Weil, associate professor emeritus of anthropology, was reviewed Aug. 11 in Newsday. The review notes that the authors “outline the growing pains leading up to the invention of the modern typewriter and its impact on education, women in the workforce and more.” The book, coauthored with Paul Robert and published by Sterling Publishing Co., features more than 175 images.  

Presentations

The organizers of the DAMIN (Dépréciation de l’Argent Monétaire et relations Internationales) Conference have uploaded a video of University of Delaware economics professor Farley Grubb's presentation, "Common Currency versus Currency Union: The U.S. Continental Dollar and Denominational Structure, 1775-1779," for interested viewers. Grubb gave this presentation during the DAMIN Conference at the University of Applied Sciences in Warburg, Germany in November 2015.

John D. M. Caldwell, senior assistant librarian and political papers archivist at the University of Delaware Library, chaired and presented a panel “Hands-on Introduction to Born-Digital Processing” as part of the Congressional Papers Section pre-conference program at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, on July 26. The hands-on panel demonstrated four digital preservation tools for congressional archivists to use in their repositories. 

Grants

Andrew Jenks, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Relations who works at the intersection of political science and disability studies, has received a grant from the Analyzing the Relationship between Disability, Rehabilitation and Work (ARDRAW) Small Grant Program of the Social Security Administration. Jenks will work with Aaron Fichtelberg, associate professor of sociology and criminal justice, on the one-year research project titled “Factors Affecting Employment Outcomes of SSI/SDI Beneficiaries who are Blind and Visually Impaired: A Case Study of Delaware.” SSI and SDI are programs administered by Social Security for people with disabilities.

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