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Kudos

Recognition for Dartmouth faculty, staff, and students.

Did you or a colleague recently receive an award or honor? Tell us about it: vox.of.dartmouth@dartmouth.edu.

World Book (Photo provided)

Visiting Professor Lynne Avadenka, a noted book artist from Michigan, won the Dorothy Saxe Award for Creativity in Contemporary Arts for her piece World Book, recently displayed in the "New Works/Old Stories: 80 Artists Interpret the Seder Plate" national invitational exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. Avadenka spent spring term at Dartmouth co-teaching the new "Book Arts Seminar" course, with Associate Professor of English Alexandra Halasz.

Mary Childers (Photo by Joseph Mehling '69)

College Ombudsperson Mary Childers was the 2009 commencement speaker for the Community College of Vermont, where she received the Award for Civic Engagement and Leadership as a result of her efforts to raise consciousness about poverty in the state. Childers runs workshops based on her memoir Welfare Brat. She has collaborated with Vermont Equal Opportunity Programs, the Windsor Prison, and the United Way of Burlington, among others, to address challenges and stigmas faced by the poor.

Rajdev and Gogo (Bruce Cook Photography)

Two Dartmouth graduate students placed first in the United States and second globally out of more than 300 competitors in the 2009 Global Social Venture Competition. Shivam Rajdev, Tuck '09, and Ashifi Gogo, a Ph.D. Innovation Program candidate at Thayer School, won $10,000 for their business plan introducing mPedigree Logistics, a project that fights conterfeit medicines by allowing consumers to confirm a drug's authenticity via text message. The pair will conduct product trials in Nigeria this summer and hope to enter the Indian market next year.

Dartmouth's Office of Public Affairs won a Circle of Excellence Bronze Award from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) for the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment 30th Anniversary Brochure. The project was edited by Laurel Stavis and designed by Jermaine Johnson. Former Montgomery Endowment Directors Susan DeBevoise Wright, Barbara Gerstner, and the late Edward Connery Lathem '51 all served as consulting editors, while Christopher Wren '57 contributed an essay on the endowment's history.

Alex Trebek and Ana Posada (Photo provided)

Microbiology Ph.D. student Ana Posada appeared on the quiz show Jeopardy! on June 2. Posada, who studies in Ambrose Cheung's laboratory, researches the genetic mechanisms behind antibiotic resistance in Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). She says her scientific studies were of little help in the contest, as most questions focused on popular culture. Posada held a strong lead going into the final round, but a missed question and bold wager in Final Jeopardy! cost her the win.

Supattapone (Photo by Judy Rees)

Research by Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Medicine Surachai Supattapone and his team was cited in the April 2009 issue of The Scientist. Their study, first published in 2007 and since cited more than 50 times, was the first study to show that normal proteins can morph into infectious proteins without being exposed to infectious material. Supattapone and his team triggered the transformation by mixing normal proteins with RNA and lipids and exposing them to sound waves. First author Nathan Deleault, a senior research associate, played "a crucial role in making the discovery," says Supattapone.

Waddell (Photo provided)

The documentary film Grandmother to Grandmother: New York to Tanzania, which premiered at Dartmouth in April, played at the Global Health Council's 36th Annual International Conference on Global Health in Washington, D.C., on May 28. Executive Producer Richard Waddell, research assistant professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and consultant for the Dickey Center's Global Health Initiative, introduced the film.

BY SARAH MAXELL CROSBY '04