Carnegie Mellon University

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May 02, 2013

Personal Mention

Alumnus Rob Rogers (MFA’84), a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist, has won the Thomas Nast Award from the Overseas Press Club for excellence in cartooning on international affairs. Rogers' entry included cartoons on Iran's nuclear ambitions, the civil war in Syria and the tweets of Pope Benedict XVI. Rogers has won many awards for his political drawings, including the 2000 Nast award. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Rogers' cartoons appear six days a week in the Post-Gazette and are syndicated internationally by United Features Syndicate. Read more.

Jendayi Frazer will attend the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, May 8-10. While there, she will participate in a panel discussion on "Mapping the African Growth Landscape," which will examine what sectors and industries hold the most promise for growth and diversification in the next decade. Frazer, a distinguished service professor in the Dietrich College and Heinz College, was a leading architect of U.S.-Africa policy over the last 10 years, most recently serving as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from August 2005 to January 2009.

English Professor Terrance Hayes was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, which identifies and recognizes the state's distinguished writers to promote their literature's influence on cultural heritage. Hayes, a South Carolina native, teaches beginning and advanced poetry workshops in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences' Department of English. He has written four books of poetry, including "Lighthead," which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry. Among his many other honors and awards in 2011, Hayes was chosen to serve as a panelist for President Barack Obama's National Students Poets Program and was selected as a United States Artist Fellow in Literature.

David Dzombak, the Walter J. Blenko, Sr. University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the University of Pittsburgh's Radisav D. Vidic were recently recognized by the American Academy of Environmental Scientists and Engineers (AAEES) for helping to address the global water shortage for use in power plant cooling systems. They received the grand prize in the University Research category of the AAEES Excellence in Environmental Engineering and Science competition for a project titled "Use of Treated Municipal Wastewater as Power Plant Cooling System Makeup Water." Vidic is the William Kepler Whiteford Professor and chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering at Pitt. Read more.

Obituary: John C. Reynolds

John C. Reynolds, a long-time Computer Science Department (CSD) professor known for his incisive work on the logical foundations of programs and programming languages and for his mentoring of students and junior faculty members, died April 28 of cancer and congestive heart disease. He was 77. A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. May 11 at Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum. He is survived by his wife, Mary, and his two sons, Edward and Matthew.

“We will always remember John for his cheerful spirit, his high ethical standards, and his deep intellect,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science. “He will very much be missed.”

“He cared sincerely for the well-being and career development of his students, continuing to provide guidance and advice for years after graduation,” said Stephen Brookes, professor of computer science. Brookes said he showed similar concerns in his mentorship of junior faculty and was a frequent and productive collaborator with many researchers.

Reynolds joined the CSD faculty in 1986, but had retired from active teaching Jan. 1.

His main research interests were the design of programming languages and languages for specifying program behavior, mathematical tools for defining the semantics of such languages, and methods for proving the correctness of programs. Some of his most influential work was published 10 years ago, when he and Peter O’Hearn, now at University College London, developed a framework for reasoning about programs called separation logic, which has developed into a significant area of research with practical benefits. Separation logic supports “local reasoning,” in which specifications and proofs of a program component mention only the portion of memory used by the component, rather than the entire global state of the system. This work forms the basis for automated tools for program analysis, capable of dealing with software running on parallel processors. Read the full obituary.