Awards and Accolades

The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality awarded John DeLamater the SSSS Distinguished Service Award. The Award is "granted to recognize a professional for outstanding contributions to the Society.  You have contributed for so many years, as Journal of Sex Research Editor, an active committee representative, and a volunteer whenever asked." Among the many roles DeLamater has filled with SSSS are multiple terms as a member of the Board of Directors, President of the MidContinent Region, Chair of the Sexology PhD. Task Force, and Chair of the Society's web committee.

The Society also announced at its annual meting that, of all the articles published in the Journal of Sex Research, 2005 to 2008, (about 35 per year), DeLamater's article, "Sexual desire in later life," published in 2005 and co-authored with then-graduate student, Morgan Sill, is the most frequently cited.

Irene Katele is one of four teaching faculty throughout the University of Wisconsin System, and only two at UW-Madison, to be selected for the Alliant Energy Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award. The annual award recognizes outstanding commitment to student success.

Alberto Palloni was named the Samuel Preston Professor of Sociology. The UW-Madison WARF named professorship program honors those faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities.

Cora Marrett named acting deputy director of the National Science Foundation. The NSF deputy director is the agency's second ranking official after the director. Link to news release

M. Giovanna Merli received a Vilas Associate Award, a flexible research support award, from the UW-Madison Graduate School.

American Sociological Association section elections: Sara Goldrick-Rab was named to the Sociology of Education section council. Mustafa Emirbayer was named Chair-elect of the Sociological Theory section. Ameilia Karraker elected student representative to the Aging and the Life Course section. Ivan Ermakoff was named to the Comparative and Historical Sociology section council. Pam Oliver Chairs the Rationality and Society section.

Jane Allyn Piliavin received the Cooley-Mead Award for lifetime contributions to distinguished scholarship in social psychology. This is the highest honor conferred by the Social Psychology section of the Americal Sociological Association and honors long-term contributions of a sociologist to the field of social psychology. Introductions of Jane Allyn Piliavin. Jane's award presentation address.

Social Psychologists celebrated the centennial of the field of Social Psychology with a series of spectacular talks, and a reception and gala dinner in Madison.

Fabian Pfeffer received the David Lee Stevenson Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Education section for his paper "Persistent Inequality in Educational Attainment and its Institutional Context."

Ivan Ermakoff won a Vilas Associate Award from the Graduate School for his work on the involvement of the French police in anti-Jewish persecutions during the second world war.

Professor Gay Seidman was awarded a $100,000 multi-year grant from the UW-Madison Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy. Seidman's collaborative is called "Governance in Economic Development: Law, Politics and the Role of the State."

Michel Guillot received an H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship. The award, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), recognizes great potential in faculty who have earned tenure within the last four years. Award-winners receive a $50,000 award to be used in support of research. Link to news release

Angela Barian was selected as a Letters & Science Teaching Fellow. This honor recognizes the superior quality of performance as a Teaching Assistant.

M. Giovanna Merli delivered the William H. Sewell lecture. Her talk was entitled "Epidemiology, Social Sciences and the Spread of HIV/AIDS in China."

Jane Piliavin received the Cooley-Mead award from the ASA Section on Social Psychology. The award recognizes lifetime contributions to scholarship in social psychology. Cora Marrett recevied ASA's Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award is. This award recognizes her lifetime of teaching, research, and service in the intellectual tradition of Cox, Charles Johnson, and Franklin Frazier.

Three sociology majors, along with their faculty collaborators, were awarded Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowships. Congratulations to Janna Jurowicz and Professor Joe Elder, Caitlin Gilbert and Professor John DeLamater, and Emily Nell and Associate Professor Debby Carr.

Sandy Levitsky (UW Soc PhD 2006) won the Law and Society Association's Dissertation Prize, for her study "Private Dilemmas of Public Provision: The Formation of Political Demand for State Entitlements to Long-Term Care." The Law and Society Association is the premier scholarly body in the interdisciplinary field of socio-legal studies.

Ivan Ermakoff delivered the William H. Sewell lecture.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Geglia and Kyle Rolnick, Sociology majors and winners of two highly competitive College of Letters and Science scholarships. Ms. Geglia is the recipient of the Leo and Jean Besozzi Scholarship and Mr. Rolnick is the recipient of the Florence Waste Pulver Scholarship.

John DeLamater delivered the William and Joyce Wartman Lecture on Human Sexuality and the Liberal Religious Tradition at the First Unitarian Society of Madison.

Sarah Bowen, Sarah Warren and Jennifer Wiegel were each awarded Tinker-Nave Field Grants from the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) Program to facilitate their research.

Footnotes (newsletter of the American Sociology Association) published an article on our department's Undergraduate Concentration in Analysis and Research (CAR).

Shane Sharp and Peter Brinson were selected as L&S Teaching Fellows. The Teaching Fellow Award is granted to TAs from the College of Letters and Science, the College of Ag and Life Sciences, and the School of Human Ecology who have achieved outstanding success as students and teachers. Winners of this award are named L&S Fellows and serve as instructors at the L&S TA training session at the start of the fall semester.

Daniel Kleinman, Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology, was awarded a Vilas Associateship by the Graduate School. The award provides two years of support for Daniel's work on his project "Disease and Discipline: The Formation, Solidification, and Development of Plant Pathology in the United States."

Pamela Oliver was recognized for her "impact on the criminal justice system, legislature, and re-entry process" by Voices Beyond Bars, a program of the Madison-Area Urban Ministry.

Joan Fujimura won a Vilas Associate fellowship to work on her study "Race, Biomedical Genomics, and Society," which focuses on the debates about the use of "race" or "ethnicity" as concepts in biomedical research, with a special emphasis on the imprecise ways the concept of a "population" has been used.

James Benson, Danielle Berman, Peter Brinson and Kristen Springer each won a Graduate Student Mentor Award awarded by the Graduate Student Collaborative.

Michael Bell's book, Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability won an Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association.

Ellen Jacobson has won the College of Letters and Science Advising Award. From the nomination criteria: Academic advising is critical to the success of both undergraduate and graduate students. These annual advising awards acknowledge the importance of all advisors, and they allow the College to recognize and reward the exemplary work of faculty and academic staff advisors.

Jennifer L. Dykema has won the Kathryn DuPre Lumpkin Award for the Best Dissertation in the Sociology Department. Jennifer's dissertation, Analysis of Factors Influencing Errors in Self-Reports About Child Support and Other Family-Related Variables, was nominated by Nora Cate Schaeffer.

Erin Hatton won a Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Award for Early Excellence. The Early Excellence Award recognizes outstanding and inspirational achievement on the part of TAs with fewer than 4 semesters of teaching experience.

Jeremy Freese delivered the William H. Sewell lecture

Sarah Faith Nehrling was appointed as a Junior Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. An undergraduate in Sociology, Sarah also won a prestigious Alfred Reschke Scholarship this fall.

Doctoral candidate Carolina Milesi was awarded a Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for research related to education.

Alberto Palloni received a highly selective MERIT award (or Method to Extend Research in Time) from the National Institutes of Health. http://www.news.wisc.edu/11458.html

Faculty honors:
Robert M. Hauser was elected to the American Philosophical Society
Alberto Palloni was elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Elizabeth Thomson was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Wisconsin Sociology ranked #1 in the new US News & World Report rankings of graduate programs. Read UW news release on rankings | View rankings at USNews.com