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Kudos
History professor John Y. Simon, executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association, received a 2004 Lincoln Prize for outstanding achievement for the landmark The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. This scholarly edition of Grant's correspondence and other writings currently stands at 26 volumes. Simon has worked on the project since its inception in 1962. "It has been an opportunity for me to spend time with a spectacular figure in American history," he says. "Grant was a complex character--an unmilitary soldier, an unpolitical president and an unliterary author." The Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College administers the Lincoln Prizes.
A highly competitive $30,000 media grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will enable Tom Godell, associate director of SIUC's Broadcasting Service, and Jan Thompson, assistant professor of radio-television, to research and write a treatment for a two-hour documentary about influential 20th-century conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
The National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award has gone to two more assistant professors in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, bringing its number of CAREER Award holders to four. Yong Gao won $465,000 for research on using magnetic nanoparticles to recycle reagents, catalysts, and other chemical compounds by extracting impurities. Boyd Goodson won $550,000 for research on using lasers and liquid crystal solutions to enhance nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies of molecular structure and dynamics.
SIUC's 2003 Outstanding Dissertation award went to Saikat Talapatra, who earned his Ph.D. in engineering science in 2002. Working in the lab of physics professor Aldo Migone, Talapatra did groundbreaking research on the mechanisms by which gas atoms adsorb (bind) to bundles of carbon nanotubes. These tiny tubes, whose walls are only one atom thick, may someday be used in energy systems to store hydrogen. Among other things, Talapatra determined the location of adsorption sites, the surface area available for adsorption, and the binding energy of various gases. His lab experiments also showed that gas atoms adsorbed to nanotubes behave like one-dimensional matter. Milton Cole, a theoretical physicist at Pennsylvania State University, has called the discovery "a landmark contribution to science."
Anthropology master's student Haagen Klaus won the SIU Alumni Association's 2003 Outstanding Thesis award for his excavation and analysis of a pre-Incan metal and ceramic workshop and associated cemetery on the north coast of Peru. By studying the type, quality, and placement of grave goods at the 1,000-year-old site, as well as analyzing the human remains for indicators of health and diet, Klaus made the case that burial practices varied with the ethnicity and status of the deceased. Izumi Shimada, the anthropology professor with whom he worked, says that Klaus's work "constitutes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding field of bioarchaeology."
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