Appointments, honors and activities
• Faculty and staff honors:
- Guang Cheng, an assistant professor of statistics, was selected as the research fellow in the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Science Institute. The appointment is from January to May 2013.
- R. Graham Cooks, the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded the F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research for his work with mass spectrometry. The award was established in 1995 by Texas A&M University, in honor of F. Albert Cotton. Cooks was highlighted for his work to understand physical phenomena, development of new instrumentation, and chemical reactions under vacuum and in microdroplets.
- Jose Figueroa-Lopez, an assistant professor of statistics, received a National Science Foundation Award in the amount of $400,000. Figueroa-Lopez's project, which will be funded by the award, is titled, "CAREER: Bridging High-Frequency Data Analysis and Continuous-time Features of Levy Models." The award is effective June 1.
• Notables:
- Nobel laureate Ei-ichi Negishi, the Herbert C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Organic Chemistry, visited the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Braga, Portugal. Negishi gave a lecture titled "Magical Power of Bock d-Transition Metals in Organic Synthesis."
• Alumni honors:
- Amit Prakash Sharma was awarded the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in India. He is one of 463 scientists who have received this award since its inception in 1958. Sharma received a bachelor's degree in biological sciences from Purdue in 1990. He is working at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi, India.