Faculty Kudos - Weeks of March 24 and March 31, 2008
John deDios has been assigned as the deputy photo lead for the photo track at the Unity 2008 Student Convergence Project. About 75 professionals and 92 students are expected to participate.Shahira Fahmy, who will join the faculty in August, had her research cited in the 2008 State of the News Media report, produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report discussed Fahmy's survey of 245 online journalists on the most critical skills needed in their jobs.
Susan Knight has won the 2007-08 College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. She will be honored at a university awards ceremony April 16. On May 16, she will receive the teaching award at the SBS Commencement Recognition Ceremony.
Adjunct faculty Sarah Gassen and Gwyneth Shaw and staff member Kate Harrison have been accepted into the master's program in journalism at the UA. Classes start this fall.
The World Without Us, written by Alan Weisman, continues to earn kudos.
The book has been named a "distinguished finalist" for the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. The award is administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Judges chose to honor the book from among 125 books submitted for the prize, which recognizes, according to Columbia University's Web site, "superb examples of nonfiction writing that exemplify the literary grace, the commitment to serious research, and the social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award's namesake, J. Anthony Lukas."
In addition, the American Booksellers Association announced in "Bookselling This Week" that it gave The World Without Us a 2008 Honor Award in the Adult Nonfiction category. The group also chose the book as among its favorite "hand sells" of 2007.
Weisman also has been named a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award. The Orion Book Award is conferred annually to an outstanding, literary, book-length work that is ecological in context and has as its foundation the human relationship with the natural world. The winner will be announced in early April and presented on April 16 in New York City. Weisman shares the honor with colleague Mort Rosenblum, who also was nominated for the award. In 2007 Rosenblum published his 13th book, Escaping Plato's Cave: How America's Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival.
Student Kudos
Taylor Baughman and Annie Chandler are members of the UA women's swimming and diving team that won the 2008 national championship.Nathan Olivarez-Giles was accepted into the Los Angeles Metpro program that begins in the fall. Metpro is a two-year diversity program designed to help beginning journalists launch careers in Tribune newsrooms. Each participant can expect formal mentoring, frequent performance evaluations and coaching, a thorough grounding in journalism ethics and relevant laws pertaining to libel and privacy, an opportunity to cover communities, including cops, courts and city councils, a thorough understanding of public records and research tools and an opportunity to prepare stories for the Web. Olivarez-Giles will work at the Los Angeles Times.