Recipients of the Award for Scholarship

2012 Faculty Award Recipients

Colin Dueck

Colin Dueck, associate professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs, is an expert in U.S. foreign policy, international strategy, diplomacy, and conservative American politics. Throughout his career, he has written articles for a variety of prestigious publications, such as International Security, Orbis, Political Science Quarterly, the Review of International Studies, Security Studies, and World Policy Journal. In his work, he examines American foreign policy and international strategy from a variety of angles. His 2010 Policy Review article is titled, “Regaining a Realistic Foreign Policy.” He is the author of two books, most recently, “Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II,” published in 2010.

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The Center of Excellence in Neuroergonomics, Technology, and Cognition

centecThe Center of Excellence in Neuroergonomics, Technology, and Cognition (CENTEC) was launched on July 15, 2010 and is funded by the United States Air Force, initially for a period of five years with a grant of $7.5 million. The center conducts research on neuroergonomics, a relatively new field that examines brain function in relation to performance, safety and efficiency in practical and work environments. The center works on projects for the Air Force, with the aim of enhancing human effectiveness in air, space and cyberspace operations. The Air Force is currently interested in how brain mechanisms affect regular tasks. CENTEC staff is tackling this mandate with three areas of focus: scholarly research, graduate student and postdoctoral fellow training (CENTEC funds 8-10 students each year), and collaboration with Air Force scientists, including an exchange program with scientists at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Since the center’s inception, CENTEC scholars have been published in a variety of journals, including NeuroImage, Public Library of Science One, and the Journal of Neuroscience.

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2011 Faculty Award Recipients

Martin De Nys

Martin De Nys, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, spent the first half of his academic career studying historical figures and texts in the field of philosophy, writing commentaries and analyses on some of the most intriguing and difficult works he came across. He then spent time writing about philosophical issues, using his previous historical analyses to inform his work. His areas of expertise include the works of philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, philosophical theology and political philosophy. He published two books in 2009: Hegel and Theology, which is an analysis of Hegel's understanding of Christianity, and Considering Transcendence, a work that explores different approaches to real life. A sequel to Considering Transcendence is in the works, in which De Nys explores philosophical issues surrounding the idea of God. Another philosophical heavyweight, Martin Heidegger, will be under the De Nys microscope soon; the professor plans to release a book that will take a critical and appreciative look at Heidegger's ideas.

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Rosemarie Zagarri

Rosemarie ZagarriRosemarie Zagarri, a professor in the Department of History and Art History, studies colonial American history, women's history and 18th-century transatlantic history. She published her first academic book in 1987, The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States, 1776-1850, and has since published two others, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution, and Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. She has also edited a book on George Washington. Zagarri has won numerous awards and grants for her work, and has appeared on such networks as C-SPAN and PBS. After publishing Revolutionary Backlash in 2007, Zagarri began work on a biography of Thomas Law, an important reformer in the days of the early United States.

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2010 Faculty Award Recipient

Alan Cheuse

Tyler Cowen Alan Cheuse received his PhD in comparative literature from Rutgers University in 1974.  He is author of the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers' Club, The Light Possessed, To Catch the Lightening, and Song of Slaves in the Desert, plus several collections of short fiction and a pair of novellas published as The Fires.  He also published nonfiction work titled Fall Out of HeavenAn Autobriographical Journey.  As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered.  He has edited with Caroline Marshall a volume of short stories, Listening to Ourselves,with Nicholas Delbanco, Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, and with Lisa Alvarez Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction.  His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Black Warrior Review, The Idaho Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere.  A collection of his travel writing, A Trance After Breakfast, was published in the summer of 2009.  The second edition of his introduction to literary study--Literature:Craft & Voice--which he wrote with Nicholas Delbanco has recently come out from McGraw-Hill.

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2009 Faculty Award Recipients

Tyler Cowen

Tyler CowenTyler Cowen is the Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics and a professor at George Mason University and the Center for Study of Public Choice. He also is director of the Mercatus Center.

Cowen is the coauthor of and daily blogger on the world-renowned economics blog Marginal Revolution, which has had more than 23 million unique visits. A columnist with the New York Times and Money, Cowen is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio.  He has written many journal articles and 10 books, including his latest work Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. 

He has been described as a “libertarian bargainer,” that is, someone of libertarian ideals who is not so radical that he cannot influence the currently powerful. His areas of research and the focus of his writing are the economics of culture, globalization, microeconomics, and political philosophy.

Cowen received an undergraduate degree from Mason in 1983 and a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. 

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Jagadish Shukla

Jagadish Shukla, University Professor, is the founding chair of the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Sciences and the Climate Dynamics PhD Program at George Mason University. He also serves as president of the Institute of Global Environment and Society.

Shukla has made significant contributions to the science of meteorology and global society through fundamental scientific advances, institution building, and international cooperation in meteorology for the betterment of humankind worldwide. His work has had a considerable influence on the understanding of the predictability of weather and climate, including Asian monsoon dynamics, deforestation, and climate change. His research has established that there is predictability in the midst of chaos and a scientific basis for short-term climate prediction.

The author or coauthor of 200 scientific papers and the editor of and contributor to four books, Shukla was a lead author of the 2007 IPCC report that shared the Noble Peace Prize with Al Gore.  In 2008, he was appointed to the Commission on Climate Change by the governor of Virginia.

Shukla has been a thesis advisor for numerous doctoral students. He also was instrumental in establishing research centers in India and Italy, as well as founding Gandhi College for the education of rural women in the village of his birth in India.

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2008 Faculty Award Recipients

Professor June Tangney

June Price Tangney received her PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA.  After teaching for two years at Bryn Mawr College, she joined the Psychology Department at George Mason University in 1988, where she is currently university professor of psychology.  A Fellow of APA’s Division of Personality and Social Psychology, Professor Tangney is coauthor (with Ronda Dearing) of Shame and Guilt, coeditor (with Kurt Fischer) of Self-conscious emotions:  Shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride, and co-editor (with Mark Leary) of the Handbook of Self and Identity. 

She has served as Associate Editor for Self and Identity, Consulting Editor for Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Psychological Assessment, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, and Journal of Personality, and is currently Associate Editor of American Psychologist.  Her research on the development and implications of moral emotions has been funded by NIDA, NICHD, NSF, and the John Templeton Foundation. Currently, her work focuses on moral emotions among incarcerated offenders.  A recipient of GMU’s Teaching Excellence Award, she strives to integrate service, teaching and clinically-relevant research in both the classroom and her lab.

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Professor Shobita Satyapal

Shobita Satyapal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University.  She works in the area of observational infrared extragalactic astronomy and instrumentation, and the spectroscopy of active, interacting, and ultraluminous galaxies.  Her current research interests focus on understanding the connection between supermassive black holes and the galaxies in which they reside.   This research, which has resulted in 23 refereed publications, utilizes primarily space-based imaging and spectroscopic observations using Chandra and the Spitzer Space Telescope, with the ultimate aim of understanding the role of such galaxies in galactic formation and evolution. 

Dr. Satyapal’s research on black holes found in distant galaxies has received considerable media attention in 2008.  Her work has been supported by over $2 million in NASA grants on which she was the PI on about a substantial fraction. Her most prestigious honors include a $500 thousand dollar Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers bestowed in 1998 – which is the highest honor bestowed by the government to young scientists.   She has also received several National Research Council Fellowships, a Garber Fellowship award, and a Smithsonian Fellowship Award .While at GMU she has engaged 16 undergraduates and 6 graduate students in research projects.

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2007 Faculty Award Recipients

Michael E. Summers

Michael E. Summers is a planetary scientist who studies the structure, origin, and evolution of planetary atmospheres. Summers received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1985. His research has dealt with the atmospheres of the Earth and most of the other planets in our solar system along with several of their moons. He has collaborated on numerous NASA planetary, satellite, and space shuttle missions.

Summers is currently a member of the science team of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and its moon Charon, which was launched in January, 2006, performed a flyby of Jupiter in February 2007 on its way to a rendezvous with Pluto in 2015. His work on Mars deals with the possibility of subsurface life and methods of its detection. He is a member of the NASA/Langley Mars Airplane team that is planning the first airplane to fly on another planet. His research on Earth's atmosphere has focused on atmospheric ozone and the formation of noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds on Earth. He is a member of the science team of the AIM satellite mission that was launched in 2007 to study the role of these clouds as possibly the most sensitive indicator of global climate change.

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James E. Maddux

The Director of the Clinical Psychology doctoral program, Dr. Maddux is a clinical psychologist whose major interest is the integration of theory from clinical, social, and health psychology. His research is concerned primarily with understanding the influence of beliefs about personal effectiveness and control on psychological adjustment and health-related behavior. He is the Editor of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and Self and Identity. He has published papers in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Health Psychology, and American Psychologist. He is co-author of Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains and co-editor of Psychopathology: Foundations for a Contemporary Understanding. He also is a member of the Examination Committee of the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards, which creates the Examination for the Professional Practice of Psychology. Dr. Maddux is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association's Divisions of General, Clinical, and Health Psychology.

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2006 Faculty Award Recipients

Susanne Denham

Susanne A. Denham is an applied developmental psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. Her research focuses on children’s social and emotional development. She is especially interested in the role of emotional competence in children’s social and academic functioning. She is also investigating the development of forgiveness in children.

Denham’s program on social-emotional assessment for school readiness is currently funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. In addition, her work on the intra- and interpersonal contributors to children’s forgiveness, and her longitudinal investigation on the development of emotional competence are ongoing. She is the author of two books Emotional Development in Young Children and, with Dr. Rosemary Burton, Social and Emotional Prevention and Intervention Programming for Preschoolers as well as numerous scholarly articles. Having served as a member of several editorial boards, Denham is currently the editor of Early Education and Development. Denham received her MA from The Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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Lance Liotta

Lance A. Liotta, professor of life sciences at George Mason University, was one of the first scientists to investigate the process of tumor invasion and metastasis at a molecular level. Scientists in his Laboratory of Pathology discovered a series of novel genes and proteins that regulate cancer invasion and metastasis, providing new strategies for cancer diagnosis and treatment. His groundbreaking work has led to the invention of technologies used in more than 1,000 labs worldwide.

Liotta is co-director of the GMU Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine. The goal of the Center is to discover new proteins useful for the early detection and individualized therapy of cancer and other diseases. He holds more than ninety patents for his work and has published more than 600 papers. Liotta is the recipient of numerous scientific awards for cancer research, including the U.S. Surgeon General’s Medal. He earned an MD/PhD from Case Western Reserve Medical School. His PhD is in biomedical engineering.

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2005 Faculty Award Recipient

Linda J. Seligmann

Linda J. SeligmannLinda J. Seligmann is a professor of anthropology and director of Graduate Studies of the Anthropology Program at George Mason University. She has served as coordinator of the Anthropology Program and director of the Center for the Study of the Americas at George Mason. She is a specialist in the Andean region of Latin America with research interests in agrarian issues, political economy, and the dynamics of gender, class, and ethnicity in the informal economy, and she has spent more than 20 years doing field research in both urban and rural regions of the Andes. Her published books include Peruvian Street Lives: Culture, Power and Economy among Market Women of Cuzco; an edited volume, Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares; and Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969-1991.

She has also published numerous articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology and Ethnohistory. Her current research is on transnational and transracial adoption and changing assumptions about American families.

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2004 Faculty Award Recipient

Debra B. Bergoffen

Debra BergoffenDebra B. Bergoffen is professor of philosophy and is a member of both the Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies faculties. Bergoffen’s philosophical and interdisciplinary research is rooted in the continental and feminist traditions. She is the author of numerous journal articles and anthology chapters, and the co-editor of several collections of philosophical essays. Her book, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities details the significance of Beauvoir’s singular philosophical voice and examines its impact on contemporary philosophical and feminist theory. Bergoffen’s research probes the ways in which U.N. Tribunal judgments in the wake of the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda direct us to revisit our concepts of humanity, human dignity, and human rights.

Bergoffen chaired the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies from 1980-1987, and was Director of the Women’s Studies Research and Resource Center from1998-2002. She received George Mason's Distinguished Faculty Award in 1989 and Teaching Excellence Award in 1993.

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2003 Faculty Award Recipients

Barbara Melosh

Barbara MeloshBarbara Melosh is a professor of English and History who serves on the faculties of Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. She held an appointment as curator of medical sciences at the National Museum of American History during her first seven years at George Mason. She received her PhD in American civilization from Brown University in 1979. Melosh’s career reflects her broad interests in American social and cultural history. She has authored The Physician’s Hand: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Temple Univ. Press, 1981), Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Art and Theatre (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption, (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).

An adoptive mother herself, Melosh tells the story of how men and women without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. She is currently preparing for a second career as an ordained minister, studying for her Master of Divinity at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. She is working on a book-length memoir of her recent experience as a hospital chaplain.

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Vernon Smith

Vernon SmithVernon L. Smith, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, 2002, is currently professor of economics and law at George Mason University, a research scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES), and a Fellow of the Mercatus Center all in Arlington, VA. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 articles and books on capital theory, natural resource economics, and experimental economics. He serves on or has served on the board of editors of numerous journals, as president of various societies, as professor of several universities, and as a Fellow with many organizations. He is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, an Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year, the 1995 Adam Smith award recipient conferred by the Association for Private Enterprise Education.

The Cambridge University Press published his Papers in Experimental Economics in 1991, and they published a second collection of more recent papers, Bargaining and Market Behavior, in 2000.

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2002 Faculty Award Recipient

Robert Ehrlich

Robert EhrlichRobert Ehrlich is author or editor of nineteen books, including Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True, (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001). He has written numerous articles in the areas of particle physics, nuclear arms control, and physics education. He has been an associate editor of the American Journal of Physics and has received several grants. Recently, he was honored as the recipient of the 2001 American Association of Physics Teacher's award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Ehrlich has lectured widely on his work in the United States and abroad.

Ehrlich is a professor of physics and serves in the School of Computational Sciences at George Mason University since 1977. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1964. While at Columbia he worked on the "two-neutrino" experiment for which his thesis advisor Jack Steinberger shared the Nobel Prize. He has had faculty appointments at Rutgers University, SUNY New Paltz, and has also chaired two physics departments—SUNY's between 1970 and 1977, and George Mason's between 1977 and 1989.

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2001 Faculty Award Recipient

Kevin Avruch

Kevin AvruchKevin Avruch is author or editor of five books, including Information Campaigns for Peace Operations (2000) and Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998). He has written numerous articles and essays on culture theory and conflict analysis, nationalist and ethnoreligious social movements, politics and society in contemporary Israel, international migration, among other topics. Avruch has been book review editor of Anthropological Quarterly and serves on several editorial boards. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad, and his work has been recognized by the International Association of Conflict Management and the United States Institute of Peace, where he spent one year as senior fellow in the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace.

Avruch is professor of anthropology and served as its coordinator from 1990-1996. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and faculty and senior fellow in the Program on Peacekeeping Policy (School of Public Policy), at George Mason University, where he has been since 1980. He received his PhD from the University of California at San Diego. He has taught at UCSD, the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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2000 Faculty Award Recipient

Peter Brunette

Peter BrunettePeter Brunette is recognized nationally and internationally as a film scholar and critic. He has written or edited six books on film, including The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Martin Scorsese: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 1999). His 1987 book Roberto Rossellini (republished by University of California, 1996) remains the definitive study in English on Rossellini's films. His scholarly work has centered chiefly around European cinema and the application of poststructuralist literary theory to film. He is a weekly film critic for Film.com, and just in the last year, he served on panels at the Palm Springs Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Rotterdam Film Festival. He is also the artistic director of the Key Sunday Cinema Club with branches in six cities.

Brunette received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 and joined the faculty of George Mason University that same year. His scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and George Mason University.

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1999 Faculty Award Recipient

James Pfiffner

James PfiffnerJames P. Pfiffner is a nationally-recognized expert on the United States presidency. Pfiffner's scholarly agenda for two decades has focused on the U.S. presidency and the national government. Among his influential publications are dozens of articles and ten books, including The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running (second edition 1996) and The Modern Presidency (third edition 1999). He co-edited a special issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly on "The Crisis in the Clinton Presidency." Pfiffner's substantive contribution to that volume is titled "Sexual Probity and Presidential Character." Not only an outstanding scholar, Pfiffner is an exceptionally effective teacher and lecturer. He is invited to speak regularly at conferences and seminars, as well as at briefings of domestic and foreign government officials.

Pfiffner was a faculty member in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University since 1984. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, taught at the University of California, Riverside, California State University Fullerton, and served in the United States Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, where he earned an Army Commendation Medal of Valor.

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1998 Faculty Award Recipient

Lois E. Horton

Lois E. Horton is a professor of sociology and sits on the faculties of Cultural Studies and Women's Studies. She received her PhD from Brandeis University in 1977 and served at the University of Hawaii, Amerika Institute of Frederick Maximilian University in Munich, and as the chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mason from 1995-1997. She has lectured in Europe and Asia. Horton addresses various aspects of American and African American social and cultural life, focusing particularly on race, gender, and social change in her scholarship.

She is coeditor of A History of the African-American People, contributing author to City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of the District of Columbia (1983), and coauthor of Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Protest, and Community Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860, and Von Benin Nach Baltimore, which was published in Germany.

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1997 Faculty Award Recipient

Carol Mattusch

Carol MattuschCarol Mattusch joined the faculty of George Mason University in 1977 and chaired the Department of Art and Art History from 1982 until 1992. Her teaching has been in art history, in classical archaeology, and in several interdisciplinary programs, primarily at the undergraduate level. At the same time she has lectured for the Archaeological Institute of America and for the Smithsonian Institution Resident Associates Program, been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and served as news editor of Archaeological News.

In her scholarship, she uses an expertise in ancient bronze-LAHSting to illuminate the broader implications of ancient technology upon Classical sculpture, in order to reach as broad an audience as possible, making connections for them with their own experience in the modern world. Her work has received support from George Mason University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institute in Berlin, where she has since been appointed a Corresponding Member.

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