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June 2, 1997
Awards and Honors
On May 27 the winners of the 1997-98 Humanities Undergraduate Awards in Research were honored in a celebration and conference at Stevenson College. The award recipients are Emily Urban (linguistics), Raihan Kadri (philosophy), Marc Cirovic (literature), Gabriella de la Rosa (art history), and Phuong Nguyen (history) (photo). The award program, which was launched last year by Humanities Dean Jorge Hankamer, is designed to support and encourage student participation in humanities research. Award recipients are selected by committee and each receive $500 in support of their research, which is conducted during the following academic year. Along with honoring this year's winners, the event featured last year's award winners who presented the results of their research. In discussing the awards program, Hankamer noted, "What happens at a university in every discipline is not mere transmission of knowledge from teachers to students but also a discovery of knowledge. Students can only gain a full appreciation of the process of discovery by participating in it themselves."
Ronald Tjeerdema, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is the first recipient of the Donald G. Crosby Distinguished Achievement Award from the Department of Environmental Toxicology at UC Davis. Tjeerdema was selected from among 140 Ph.D. recipients in the department's 40-year history.
Sheila Gottehrer, the campus ombudsman, has been invited by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to participate in and present a paper on "University and College Ombudsmen" at the Third International UNDP Workshop on Ombudsman and Human Rights Institutions, June 9-11, in Riga, Latvia. Participants are expected from more than 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Ombudsmen and human-rights commissioners are also expected to attend from Western Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia. The theme of this year's workshop is "Building Democracy: From Theory to Practice." Gottehrer participated in two earlier workshops that were held in Moscow in November 1994 and in Chisinau, Moldova, in May 1996.