Awards and honors

Shiva Shahrara, associate professor of rheumatology, is among winners of the Spring 2015 Proof-of-Concept Award winners.

Awards

Spring 2015 Proof-of-Concept Award winners, chosen by the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund, are:

• Shiva Shahrara, associate professor of rheumatology, College of Medicine, “TLR5: a Novel Treatment Strategy for RA Patients”

• Shane Phillips, associate professor of physical therapy, College of Applied Health Sciences, “Wearable Continuous Cardiovascular Sensor and Algorithm for Healthcare and Rehabilitation”

• Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, College of Engineering, “An Advanced Lithium-Air Battery Cell”

• Steven Ackerman, professor, and Vadim Gaponenko, associate professor, biochemistry and molecular genetics, College of Medicine, “Development of a Peptide Nanoparticle Inhibitor of CCR3-Mediated Eosinophilic Inflammation in Asthma.”

Honors

David Merriman, professor of public administration, economics and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, was named associate editor of Economic Development Quarterly, a journal to bridge the gap between academics, policymakers and practitioners.

An abstract entry by College of Dentistry students Laura Douglas and
Somayeh Jahedi, “Achieving Optimal Oral Health for Special Needs Individuals in Chicago,” earned honorable mention in the Predoctoral Dental Student Merit Award category for Outstanding Achievement in Community Dentistry by the American Association of Public Health Dentistry.

Anne Parsons, a 2013 Ph.D. graduate in history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was named a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow by the Open Society Foundation. She will use the award to write a book that explores how the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals intersected with the rise of mass incarceration, showing how one form of confinement and stigmatization was replaced by another.

A 2010 paper by Chris Westland, professor of information and decision sciences in the College of Business Administration, “Lower bounds on sample size in structural equation modeling,” is listed by ScienceDirect as No. 36 in the “50 most downloaded computer science papers” on ScienceDirect since January 2005.