The American Academy in Rome has honored two people from MIT. J. Meejin Yoon, assistant professor of architecture, received the 2005-2006 Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize Fellowship for Design. Janna Israel, a graduate student in architecture and planning's history, theory and criticism section, received the Marian and Andrew Heiskell/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies for "Reforming Commemoration: Patronage of the Franciscan Observants in the Renaissance." The Rome Prize is awarded annually to 15 emerging artists and 15 scholars through an open juried competition.
Todd Thorsen, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Dan Luo of Cornell University have received a Futures grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. The pair will receive $75,000 to support their nanotechnology research. Futures grants are funded by a $40 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation.
Lotte Bailyn, T Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has received a 2005 Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit center for research on the changing workforce, changing family and changing community. The Work Life Legacy Award was created to "capture and share the stories of the work life field's accomplishments and honor those whose contributions have been extraordinary."
Jennifer A. Topinka (S.M. '03) has received the 2004 Society of Automotive Engineers Myers Award for Outstanding Student Paper. Topinka wrote her award-winning piece with the help of John B. Heywood, MIT's Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Sloan Automotive Lab. Their fellow co-authors were Michael D. Gerty and James C. Keck. The award was presented to Topinka on April 12 during the Honors Convocation at the annual SAE World Congress in Detroit, Mich. This award, established in 1998, is given annually for the best technical paper written by a student and presented at a major SAE meeting. Topinka, along with her co-authors, is being honored for "Knock Behavior of a Lean-Burn, H2 and CO Enhanced, SI Gasoline Engine Concept."
An MIT alumnus and a sophomore were among four winners of the MIT Arab Student Organization's 2005 Science and Technology Awards. Adel Belcaid, president of the organization, presented awards to Soulaymane Kachani (S.M. 2000, Ph.D. 2002) and sophomore Abdulrahman I. Tarbzouni at a banquet held at the MIT University Park Hotel on Saturday, April 16. Kachani, a prolific researcher in dynamic pricing and inventory management, is an assistant professor at Columbia University. He got his master's and Ph.D. degrees in operations research from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Tarbzouni is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 11, 2005 (download PDF).
