Awards and honors

The Lee College of Engineering has awarded its Alan Kulwicki Memorial Scholarship to Justin LaDuke. A formal presentation will be made Friday, Oct. 11, at Charlotte Motor Speedway prior to the Dollar General 300 NASCAR Nationwide Series race.

James Cook, professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is the first recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Award for Community Engagement.

Established in 2012, the award honors a tenured faculty member whose teaching, research and service embodies the University’s commitment to civic involvement and whose work strengthens the relationship between UNC Charlotte and the larger community.

Deeptak Verma, a 2012 graduate with a doctorate in bioinformatics and computational biology, is this year’s recipient of the Graduate School’s Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.
 Verma was honored for the dissertation “Elucidating the Effects of Mutation and Evolutionary Divergence upon Protein Structure Quantitative Stability/Flexibility Relationships.”  During his time at UNC Charlotte, his research focused on the movement of atoms within a protein, and he co-authored nine published papers based on this research. 

Juan Vivero-Escoto, an assistant professor of chemistry, is the 2013 recipient of the Ralph Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associate Universities (ORAU), a 109-member university consortium affiliated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Vivero-Escoto was among 30 winners in a pool of 147 applicants from consortium institutions. Only two faculty members per institution were permitted to apply; they underwent a highly competitive peer-review process organized by ORAU from among its members.

Warren Cole, a professional science master’s degree student in the College of Computing and Informatics Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, has received a summer internship from the Open Science Data Cloud – Partnership for International Research and Education (OSCD-PIRE) project. He will conduct his internship at the internationally acclaimed Beijing Institute of Genomics in Shenzhen, China, considered one of the world’s premiere genome sequencing centers.

Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi, professors of psychology, are joint recipients of the 2013 First Citizens Bank Scholars Medal. This prestigious honor, presented by First Citizens Bank and UNC Charlotte, recognizes faculty scholarship and intellectual inquiry.

Jing Xiao, professor of computer science in the College of Computing and Informatics, has been named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow effective Jan. 1.

She is being recognized for contributions to robot compliant motion and haptic interaction. Xiao’s core work addresses the physical interaction between a machine and objects it manipulates, which impacts the application of robotics and haptics in autonomous assembly operations, tele-operations, virtual prototyping and virtual training of surgical operations.