McGinn

Appointments and Elections

Nim Chinniah, deputy vice chancellor for administration and academic affairs, has been elected chairman of the Metro Nashville Human Relations Commission. Chinniah has served on the commission since 2004.

Thomas McGinn, professor of classics, has been appointed to a three-year term as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. The academy is one of the leading American overseas centers for independent study and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities.

Larry Schumaker, the Stevenson Professor of Mathematics, has been elected a foreign member of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Founded in 1857, the main purpose of the academy is the advancement of science and scholarship in Norway.

Awards and Honors

Joseph H. Hamilton, the Landon C. Garland Distinguished Professor of Physics, has been awarded an honorary doctor of science degree by Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India, for his contributions to the field of nuclear physics. In his nearly five decades at Vanderbilt, 14 senior scientists from India have worked with Hamilton as research associates, with five receiving Ph.D.s and three receiving M.S. degrees from the university.   

Papers and Presentations

Dietmar Bisch, professor of mathematics and chair of the department, recently served as the invited Frontiers Lecturer for the mathematics department at Texas A&M University. Bisch gave a talk titled “Analytical and Combinatorial Aspects of Subfactors,” and two colloquia, “Subfactors and Planar Algebras” and “Subfactors via Generator and Relations.”

Harold S. Park, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is co-author of two of the 25 most-downloaded papers in 2005 for Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. “An Introduction to Computational Nano Mechanics and Materials” was cited as the single most-downloaded paper, and “An Introduction and Tutorial on Multiple Scale Analysis in Solids” was among the top 25.

John P. Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education, presented “Metabolic and Signaling Dynamics for Cell Biology, Toxin ID and Drug Discovery” for Harvard University’s Department of Systems Biology in October 2005. Wikswo attended the 3rd Annual National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Conference, “The Genomic Revolution: Implications for Treatment and Control of Infectious Disease,” held in Irvine, Calif., in November. He delivered the plenary lecture “The Systems Engineering Problems of Systems Biology” at the 38th IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory at Tennessee Technical University in March 2006. In April, Wikswo presented “The Promise and Challenges of Multianalyte Metabolic Dynamics” at the BioLSI-2 Workshop at California Institute of Technology’s Kavli Nanoscience Institute. Co-authors were Vanderbilt’s Franz Baudenbacher, David Cliffel, Ales Prokop and Momchil Velkovsky; Bela Csukas of Kaposvar University (Hungary); and Jerry Jenkins and Shankar Sundaram of the CFD Research Corporation. Also in April, Wikswo presented “The Five Dimensions of Systems Biology” at the Microscale Life Sciences Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Professional Activities

Dennis C. Dickerson, professor of history, wrote the essay “Heritage and Hymnody: Richard Allen and the Making of African Methodism,” included in the collection Sing Them Over Again to Me: Hymns and Hymnbooks in America, recently published by The University of Alabama Press.

John Johns, associate professor of guitar and chair of the department, recently performed concerts at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and Christ the King Catholic Church in Nashville.

Items for “Faculty & Staff Notes” should be sent to Kara Furlong, via e-mail to kara.c.furlong@vanderbilt.edu, via fax to 343-7313 or by mail to the Vanderbilt Register, 850 Baker Building, 110 21st Ave. S., Nashville, TN 37203.

Posted 04/24/06