Personal Mention

Faculty members Lorrie Cranor and Brian K. Kovak have been named to the 2019 Class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic foundation that has supported the advancement of education and knowledge for more than a century. They are two of 32 distinguished scholars and writers selected from nearly 300 nominations.

Cranor is director and the Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies of the CyLab Privacy and Security Institute. She is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy and directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Laboratory. Furthermore, she co-directs Carnegie Mellon's Privacy Engineering master's degree program and served as chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission in 2016. Having authored over 150 papers on privacy and security, Cranor's work has championed usability as a key element to making modern technology more safe, secure and privacy-aware. Her seminal book, "Security and Usability," is widely regarded as a foundational work in the field.

Kovak, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the Heinz College, is an expert in immigration policy, international trade and labor markets. Kovak focuses on emerging technologies and labor market disruptions. He is working to develop new tools to identify the workers most likely to be negatively affected by such technologies and will evaluate a promising approach to supporting those workers.

Zachary Chase Lipton, assistant professor of business technologies at the Tepper School, was awarded the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning Research Award for his work to improve the accuracy of diagnosis of breast cancer. The AWS Machine Learning Research Award funds universities, faculty, Ph.D. students and postdoctorates to develop machine learning algorithms, publications and source code across various focus areas. Lipton will receive a $100,000 gift as part of his award. His research seeks to look at various forms of diverse data to make accurate predictions and diagnoses. The work, Lipton says, is not to replace radiologists, but to enhance and make humans more efficient. “Our work is aimed at the paraclinical setting, where we hope to improve the quality of radiologist training by producing models that not only predict cancers but also provide insights that help doctors to improve their own performance,” Lipton said. Find out more.

English Professor Jim Daniels has published his 23rd book. "The Perp Walk" is his latest collection of linked fictional stories, with the central character, E.J., loosely threading through alternating flash fiction and longer narrative pieces. For Daniels, the title holds within it a reference to the larger arc of the book — all the guilt and shame for the mistakes we make as we stumble into adult life. Weaving through years, epiphanies (and lack thereof), these stories chronicle coming of age in Michigan, though it could be any state where people work hard, play hard, and aren’t paid nearly enough for their efforts. Daniels captures both the shooting stars and the constellations that build into earned insights and honest reflections. Sometimes we need both the long version of the short version and the short version of the long version, he suggests. Daniels invites his readers to settle on some truth in between the versions, the humor and heartbreak. Find out more and listen to a reading.

Terry Irwin, head of the School of Design, will recieve an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr Univeristy of Art & Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. Irwin has been teaching at the university level since 1986. Her research is in Transition Design, a new area of design study, practice and research that argues for societal transition toward more sustainable futures. Irwin, along with Gideon Kossoff and Cameron Tonkinwise, developed Transition Design and integrated it into programs and curricula at the School of Design in 2014. She has been a practicing designer for more than 40 years and was one of the founding partners of MetaDesign, an international design firm with offices in Berlin, London, San Francisco and Zurich. Find out more.

Assistant Professor of Physics Benjamin Hunt has been named a 2019 Cottrell Scholar. Twenty-four of the nation’s top early career scientists received the designation from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). The awards recognize the recipients’ leadership in integrating science teaching and research at U.S. research universities and undergraduate institutions. Hunt will use the support from the scholar program to further his research in the role of crystal symmetry in superconductivity. Specifically, he will extend his work to a new class of two-dimensional materials that are superconductors and attempt to provide evidence for the broken symmetries that give the materials their peculiar superconducting properties. He also will create a comprehensive undergraduate condensed matter lab, which will give students the opportunity to investigate 2D materials through nanofabrication of devices and to create their own experiments to determine the properties of new configurations of the materials. Learn more.

Chemistry Ph.D. student Tatsuya Higaki has received the 2019 Student Award from the International Precious Metals Institute for his work on gold nanoparticles. The $12,000 award will be given at the institute's annual conference in June in Nevada, where Higaki will also present on his research. "The goal of my project will provide us with a protocol to enhance the functionality of gold nanoparticles, so that we can maximize the performance of metal nanomaterials using the smallest amount of resources," Higaki said. "The completion of this project is expected to impact fields such as catalysis, energy conversion, chemical sensing and bio-medicine." Learn more.