Zoltan S. Spakovsky, the C.R. Soderberg Assis-tant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics who does research in the Gas Turbine Laboratory, has received the Melville Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The award, the highest honor for best original paper published in the ASME Transactions in the past two years, recognizes a paper he co-authored titled "Unsteady Flow and Whirl-Inducing Forces in Axial-Flow Compressors: Part I--Experiment and Part II--Analysis."
Thomas DeFrantz, associate professor of theater arts, won the American Society for Theatre Research's Errol Hill Award for his edited anthology, "Dancing Many Drums; Excavations in African American Dance (Studies in Dance History)." The award, established by Professor Errol Hill of Dartmouth College to encourage development of black theater and drama, recognizes the best book published in the previous year in the area of black theater studies. Hill, who died in September, was himself a noted playwright, director and expert on black dramatists.
Victoria Sirianni, head of the Department of Facilities, was one of three women honored by the Boston Society of Architects' Women in Design Awards. The Nov. 18 luncheon recognized "exceptional women whose work reflects the spirit, innovation, transformation and enhanced level of design that women have brought to the profession."
Current or former students with links to MIT swept every prize in the George Nicholson Student Paper Competition sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. First prize went to Aurélie Thiele and Ramesh Johari, both graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science from the Laboratory for Information and Decision Sciences (LIDS). Second prize was won by Sanne de Boer (Ph.D. 2003 in operations research). Honorable mention went to Victor Martinez de Albeniz, a graduate student in the Operations Research Center, and Karthik Natarajan, a student at the National University of Singapore who is participating in the MIT-Singapore Alliance. Each student wrote his or her own paper; titles can be found at http://www.informs.org/Prizes/NicholsonPrize.html.
Klaus-Jürgen Bathe, professor of mechanical engineering, has been awarded three honorary doctorates this fall. They are from the Slovak Academy of Sciences, administered by Zilina University in Slovakia; the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany; and from the Polish Academy of Sciences, awarded at the Rzeszow University of Technology in Poland. Bathe was reconized for his outstanding fundamental contributions and the impact his work has had on computational mechanics.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 19, 2003.
