Personal Mention

Rebecca W. Doerge, the Glen de Vries Dean of the Mellon College of Science and professor of statistics and data science and biological sciences, has been chosen by her peers as chair-elect of the Statistics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. Doerge will begin her three-year term following the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting, starting as chair-elect on Feb. 18. She will become chair of the section on Feb. 17, 2020, and retiring chair on Feb. 15, 2021. She will serve on the section’s steering group that nominates and reviews candidates for AAAS Fellowship, propose and review annual meeting symposia, lead the section business meeting, serve on the Electorate Nominating Committee and represent section interests on the AAAS Council. Find out more.

Ignacio Grossmann, the Rudolph R. and Florence Dean University Professor of Chemical Engineering, received an honorary doctor’s degree from the University of Alicante in Spain at its January 28 graduation ceremony. Recognized among the 100 most influential chemical engineers of the modern era by the American Institution of Chemical Engineers, Grossmann was praised for his research skills, his commitment to education, and his interest in basic and applied research and knowledge transfer to industry. In his remarks, he focused on the great challenges of the 21st century: energy, water and global warming. He called for a joint international research effort based on sound scientific and technological principles to move forward to ensure a sustainable future for the next generations. With collaborators at the University of Alicante, Grossmann has published more than 40 scientific articles in international journals that have been presented at conferences around the world. He quoted John F. Kennedy to defend the relevance of promoting new ideas and new solutions to solve technical and social problems. "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were,” he said. This was Grossmann's seventh honorary degree.  Learn more.

Angela Campbell, executive director of the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion, is among the inaugural cohort of Carnegie Mellon’s Executive Leadership Academy, a signature program of The Advanced Leadership Initiative, which is a new regional effort whose mission is to address corporate diversity by investing in African-American executive talent. Campbell is an expert in multicultural education, gender identity, and diversity and inclusion issues in higher education. Before joining CMU this past summer, Campbell served as the assistant dean for the School of Education, assistant professor of education, and the inaugural co-director of the Center for Urban Education, Equity and Improvement at Cabrini University. Selected from a pool of nearly 60, the inaugural cohort of 24 professionals will be the first to take advantage of an opportunity that pairs African-American executives with experienced executive coaches, executive mentors, and word-class academic instruction from the Tepper School of Business. Find out more.

Illah Nourbakhsh, the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, is one of 18 newly elected Hastings Center Fellows. The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit bioethics research institution founded in 1969, addresses fundamental ethical and social issues in health care, science and technology. The people it selects as fellows are individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research and the environment. Nourbakhsh is director of the Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab. His current research projects explore community-based robotics, including educational and social robotics and ways to use robotic technology to empower individuals and communities. He is the author of “Robot Futures” and “Parenting for Technology Futures” and coauthor of the textbook “Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.” He is a World Economic Forum Global Steward and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of AI and Robotics and the IEEE Global Initiative for the Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems.