Penn Staters
Penn State Intercom......January 18 , 2001

Parvez Ahmed and Sudhir Nanda, assistant professors of finance at Penn State Harrisburg, were presenters at the 2000 Annual Conference of the Financial Management Association International in Seattle.

Omid Ansary and A.B. Shafeei, School of Science, Engineering and Technology faculty members at Penn State Harrisburg, have been awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Third Millennium Medal.

Patricia A. Book, associate vice president for outreach and executive director of continuing education, was elected to the Board of Global Associates, a Knowledge Network of the University Continuing Education Association.

A. Welford Castleman Jr., holder of the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in science and Evan Pugh professor of chemistry and physics, was an invited participant in a workshop in Egypt designed to help formulate a cooperative program in advanced nanoscale materials between Egypt and the United States. Castleman was invited to present an overview of the field.

Rupert F. Chisholm, professor of management at Penn State Harrisburg co-chaired a two-day workshop at Academy of Management Conference in Toronto. He also made a presentation as part of a symposium on "Expanding Action Research: A Familiar Method with New Groundings, Practices and Exemplars for Participative Inquiry."

Mona M. Counts, a professor and Eberly Chair of Nursing at Penn State Fayette, was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. The American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, an international organization, is the world's largest nurse-practitioner group. The FAANP program was established to recognize nurse practitioners who have made outstanding contributions to health-care practice, research, education or policy and to facilitate leadership in the profession. Twenty-one charter fellows were inducted in 2000.

Waldemar Debinski, associate professor of surgery and director of tumor research in the College of Medicine, received the Award for Excellence in Basic Research given by the Society for Neuro-Oncology and funded by the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation. It was given at the fifth Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society in Chicago.

Renee Diehl, professor of physics, has been named to the editorial board of Journal of Physics-Condensed Matter. Diehl also was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Juris G. Draguns, professor emeritus of psychology, has been selected to receive the receive the American Psychological Association's 2001 Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology. Draguns also presented keynote addresses at three scientific meetings: "Groups and Workshops in Interethnic Conflict Resolution: Their Accomplishment and Promise, with Special Reference to the Baltic Context" at the Fourth Baltic Congress of Psychology in Riga, Latvia; "Fifty Years of Perceptgenetic Research: Retrospect and Prospect" at the Perceptgenesis Symposium in Delphi, Greece; and "The Expression of Culture in Psychotherapy," in Spanish, at the Fourth International Psychology Conference at the University of the Americas in Cholula, Mexico.

Charles Garoian, director of the School of Visual Arts and professor of art education, was a keynote artist and lecturer at a New Zealand symposium, "Post Object and Postmodern Performance Art in New Zealand from the 1970s and Beyond," co-organized by the University of Canterbury and the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch, New Zealand. He performed "Breaking Water," a live work, and presented a paper.

Alireza Haghighat, professor of nuclear engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, served as co-chair for publication of PHYSOR 2000, ANS International Topical Meeting on Advances in Reactor Physics and Mathematics and Computation into the Next Millennium, held in Pittsburgh. Haghighat also organized and chaired a special session on "Parallel Computing in Reactor Physics" and presented an invited paper on "Reactor Physics Education." His students presented three papers, and he and his students conducted two mini-workshops on their advanced particle transport codes at this meeting. Haghighat also presented "Parallel Performance and Robustness of PENTRANTM (Parallel Environment Neutral-particle TRANsport) for Simulation of Real-Life Shielding Problems," "A PENTRANTM Model for a Medical Computed Tomography Scanner," "Comparison of PSU and BUGLE Libraries With Application To Pressure Vessel Neutron Dosimetry" and "Utilizing the Angular Multigrid Acceleration for Large Scale Transport Problems" at the 10th International Meeting on Radiation Protection and Shielding in Spokane, Wash.; and "Application of A3MCNP to Radiation Shielding Problems," co-authored by J.C. Wagner from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at the "MC2000 -- Advanced Monte Carlo in Radiation Physics, Particle Transport Simulation and Applications," in Lisbon, Portugal. At that conference, Haghighat co-chaired a session on "Variance Reduction Techniques."

Paul W. Howe, assistant professor of business administration/ travel and tourism at Pennsylvania College of Technology, was a featured speaker at the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association's national convention in New Orleans. Howe conducted seminars on business as it relates to the diving industry and diving travel.

Gerald G. Johnson Jr., associate professor emeritus of computer science and engineering, was elected Fellow of the International Centre for Diffraction Data. This award is given to members of the centre who have given of their time and talents, beyond that normally associated with regular membership.

Byung-Lip "Les" Lee, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics, has been selected as a member of editorial board for the Journal of Composite Materials. Also, Lee has been serving as one of three technical experts for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, advising on the recent matter of "safety recall of Firestone tires for Ford Explorer Sports and Utility Vehicles" from the viewpoint of the mechanics of flexible matrix composite materials.

Four members of the Tremin Trust Research Program on Women's Health, located in the College of the Liberal Arts and the Population Research Institute, presented papers at the International Congress of Behavioral Medicine in Brisbane, Australia. Phyllis Kernoff Mansfield, director of the Tremin Trust Program and professor of women's studies and health education, gave an invited talk as part of a panel of directors of large-scale women's health research programs; she was joined by program directors from the United Kingdom and Australia. Gretchen Gierach, senior research technologist at the Tremin Trust, Patricia Koch, associate professor of biobehavioral health and women's studies and Mansfield presented a paper on midlife sexuality changes based on the team's Midlife Women's Health Survey, for which Gierach won an Early Career Award. Susannah Barsom, NIA postdoctoral fellow, presented a paper on seasonal variations in progesterone levels in an indigenous population in Venezuela.

Julian Maynard, distinguished professor of physics, has been selected as divisional associate editor for the journal Physical Review Letters. Maynard's research includes work with physical acoustics.

Barbara W. Pennypacker, associate professor of agronomy, presented a paper at the Durable Resistance: Key to Sustainable Agriculture Symposium in Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Jorge Pullin, professor of physics, has been honored by the American Physical Society with the 2001 Edward A. Bouchet Award. Pullin was recognized for his contributions to research regarding gravitational-wave propagation and the quantum theory of gravity. He also was cited for his efforts as a founding member of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists.

SELF, a fitness and nutrition magazine, has named Volumetrics: Feel Full on Fewer Calories, written by Barbara Rolls, Guthrie chair of nutrition in the College of Health and Human Development, and co-authored by Robert A. Barnett, as the best weight-loss plan in America. In the magazine's January issue, five leading weight-management experts unanimously voted Volumetrics as the No. 1 weight-loss plan for its healthful regimen. The experts used a 30-item questionnaire to rate 13 of America's most popular weight-loss plans. Volumetrics received the rating of "A" and had the highest combined score in the survey. Volumetrics was published last year by HarperCollins and was recently released in paperback with the title The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan: Feel Full on Fewer Calories.

Sherry Roush, assistant professor of Italian, has been elected to the executive committee of the Modern Language Association's Division of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature for the term 2001-2005.

Frank Rusinko Jr., senior scientist and director of the Consortium for Premium Carbon Products from Coal in the Energy Institute gave an invited plenary talk on "From Coal to Premium Carbon Products" at the V National Congress on Science and Technology of Carbon at Valledupar, Colombia. He also gave invited talks on "Carbon Products" to a combined group from Universidad Pontificia Bolivarianna and Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medillin and also to a group at Univerdidad Nacional in Bogata.

Dennis Scanlon, professor; Thomas Bruening, associate professor; and Carol Hodes, senior research project associate, all from the agricultural and extension education department, presented an invited pre-conference workshop at the Association for Career and Technical Education meeting with staff from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education in San Diego. The workshop was titled "Career and Technical Education at the Crossroads." Mary Kisner, assistant professor of workforce education, was involved as facilitator.

Thomas Smialek, associate professor of music and integrative arts at Penn State Hazleton, presented a paper at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the College Music Society in Toronto. The meeting was part of Toronto 2000, a joint meeting of 14 academic music societies in North America.

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