The life of an academic is unusual in its phases. Many tenure-line faculty have only two events in their life when their institutions visibly recognize their contributions to teaching, research, and service. The first is when they are successfully promoted from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure; the second is when they are promoted from associate professor to full professor. It is true that there are annual merit reviews and the ongoing feedback from their peers about their scholarly work (through accepted book manuscripts or articles).
When I arrived at Georgetown in 2012, it seemed that we were missing a meaningful way to honor associate professors who were excelling in the combination of teaching, research, and service. Last year we created the designation of “Provost Distinguished Associate Professor,” to be awarded to a small set of unusually successful associate professors. This was designed as an honorific title held for five years or until the honored associate professor is promoted to full professor.
We sought nominations from faculty and units from throughout the main campus. A strong set of nominations were forwarded to a group of University Professors (our most distinguished faculty) to review the accomplishments of the nominees. We selected four initial nominees. They are the following:
James Habyarimana, McCourt School of Public Policy
James Habyarimana joined the McCourt School Public Policy in 2004 after completing doctoral studies at Harvard University. His main research interests are in Development Economics and Political Economy. In particular he is interested in understanding the issues and constraints in health, education and the private sectors in developing countries. In health he is working on understanding the impact of policy responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and evaluating a number of health improving interventions in road safety and water, sanitation and hygiene.
In education, his work focuses on identifying programs and policies to improve access and quality of secondary schooling. His primary regional focus is Africa.
He has been a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. At the McCourt School, James teaches the second course in regression methods and courses on the history of development and education and health policy in developing countries.
Diana Kapiszewski, Department of Government
Diana Kapiszewski received her PhD in political science from UC Berkeley in 2007. Her research interests include public law, comparative politics, and research methods. Her first book, High Courts and Economic Governance in Argentina and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which received the APSA Law and Courts Section’s C. Herman Pritchett Award, explores high court-elected branch interactions over economic policy in Argentina and Brazil in the post-transition period. Her current work examines judicial politics and the uses of law in Latin America. One project analyzes institutions of electoral governance and another investigates informal workers’ use of legal strategies in the region; each focuses specifically on Brazil and Mexico. She has also co-edited Consequential Courts: Judicial Roles in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
In the area of research methods, Kapiszewski co-directs the Qualitative Data Repository and co-edits the new Cambridge University Press book series, Methods of Social Inquiry. In 2013 she was awarded the APSA Qualitative and Multi-Method Research section’s Mid-Career Achievement Award.
Shiloh Krupar, School of Foreign Service
Shiloh Krupar is a Geographer and an Associate Professor of Culture and Politics in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her teaching and research interests, which span geography, architecture, performance studies, the medical humanities, and environmental justice, have explored several interrelated areas: military landscapes, such as decommissioned military sites and nuclear facilities; model cities and urban-environmental projects in China; cities in aftermath and the impacts of environmental, juridical, and financial disasters on the urban environment; and, lastly, biomedicine, specifically environmental biomonitoring, medical hot spotting, and medical geographies of waste.
The recipient of a Quadrant Fellowship, her book Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) explores the politics of nature conservation, environmental memory, contamination and compensation issues at decommissioned military sites in the western United States.
Her collaborative long-term art project “The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service” (with Sarah Kanouse, University of Iowa) works at the intersection of art, research, and government policy to address the toxic afterlife of U.S. militarism and has been included in the Institute for Wishful Thinking (NYC, 2011), “Ecocultures” exhibition (George Mason University, 2011), Figure One Gallery (Champaign, IL, 2013), and is a Finalist in the traveling show “Monument to Cold War Victory” during 2014-16 (Cooper Union, NYC, October 2014; Wende Museum, Los Angeles, 2016).
Micah Sherr, Department of Computer Science
Micah Sherr is an associate professor and director of the Georgetown Institute for Information Assurance. His academic interests include privacy-preserving technologies, electronic voting, wiretap systems, and network security. He participated in two large-scale studies of electronic voting machine systems, and helped to disclose numerous architectural vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems. His current research examines the security properties of legally authorized wiretap (interception) systems and investigates methods for achieving scalable, high-performance anonymous routing.
Micah received his B.S.E., M.S.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award.
In addition to these faculty members, I also congratulate a group of associate professors in the McDonough School of Business who were recently awarded term chairs, also in recognition of their distinguished records:
Volodymr Babich – Lapeyre Family Term Associate Professorship
Jason Brennan – Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Term Associate Professorship
Victor Jose – Sonneborn Term Associate Professorship
Jason Schloezter – Sonneborn Term Associate Professorship
Debora Thompson, – Beyer Family Term Associate Professorship
Please join me in congratulating these mid-career colleagues for their accomplishments.
Good idea
This is a great timely innovation and congratulations to the recipients
A few points:
1. Beside the honor and recognition, do the recipients receive any tangible rewards such as increased salary and/or research funding?
2. It may be a good idea to try to have these positions endowed by donors to help defray their cost to the University.
3. I believe there should be similar recognition offered at the Assistant Professor level (there have been a few endowed and named “faculty fellowships” in MSB with good results). Every year Georgetown loses some outstanding faculty members not only at the Associate Professor level but also at the Assistant Professor level (and occasionally at the Full Professor level). Such “faculty fellowships” would be very helpful in recruiting and retaining the most promising young Assistant Professors.