Faculty Awards and Honors: December 2016
Reka Albert, Distinguished Professor of Physics and Biology at Penn State University, has been elected as an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. New members are elected by the General Assembly of the Academy—the main governing body of the Academy that consists of academy members and 200 elected non-academy members. Scientists living outside of Hungary who identify as Hungarian are elected as external members. Albert was elected to the Section of Biological Sciences of the Academy and is being honored for her work applying network models to complex biological systems
Penn State University Professor of Physics Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and Director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Election to membership in the academy is one of the highest honors accorded to U.S. scientists or engineers by their peers.
Chad Hanna, assistant professor of physics at Penn State University, has been honored with the inaugural Norman and Trygve Freed Early Career Professorship in Physics. Trygve Freed— whose husband Norman Freed (1936–2014) joined the Penn State faculty in the Department of Physics in 1965, was named Associate Dean of Penn State's Eberly College of Science in 1979, and served in that position until he retired in 2011—established the professorship to support outstanding early-career faculty in physics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The professorship offers recognition for outstanding early accomplishments and provides financial support to promising young faculty members to encourage establishing a commitment to teaching and exploring new areas of research.
Katriona Shea, Alumni Professor in the Biological Sciences at Penn State University, has been elected as a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Shea is being recognized for “developing important insights into pressing environmental problems, including reconciling conflicting empirical results about invader richness and disturbance-diversity relationships.” Fellows of the ESA are members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by the ESA and are elected for life. The ESA, founded in 1915, is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth.