Prestigious Honors and Awards for Eight Women in Higher Education

Debora Rodrigues, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Houston, received the 2016 Clean Energy Education and Empowerment Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy. Her research is focused on technologies to reduce energy costs in water and wastewater treatment.

Dr. Rodrigues is a native of Brazil and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Sao Paulo. She earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and molecular genetics from Michigan State University.

Patricia Colleen Murphy, a senior lecturer in creative writing at Arizona State University, has been announced as the winner of the 19th May Swenson Poetry Award from Utah State University. As a result, she will receive a cash prize and her poetry collection, Hemming Flames, will be published by Utah State University Press later this year.

Murphy is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she majored in English and French. She earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Arizona State University.

Sharmila Majumdar, professor of radiology and the director of the Musculoskeletal Quantitative Imaging Research Group at the University of California, San Francisco, received the 2016 Gold Medal from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Dr. Majumdar was honored for her innovative contributions to the development of quantitative imaging methods.

Professor Majumdar joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco in 1989. She holds a Ph.D. in engineering and applied science from Yale University.

Erika Zimmerman, associate professor of athletic training and director of the School of Health Sciences at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, has been selected to receive the Dan Libera Award from the National Athletic Trainer’s Association at the organization’s annual meeting in Baltimore on June 23.

Dr. Zimmerman joined the faculty at Western Carolina University in 2015 after teaching at the University of Charleston in West Virginia. She holds a master’s degree from Indiana State University and a Ph.D. in leadership studies from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

Karen Bankston, associate dean for clinical practice, partnership, and community engagement in the College of Nursing at the University of Cincinnati, has been chosen to receive the Mary Mahoney Award from the American Nurses Association.

Dr. Bankston holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing from Kent State University in Ohio. She earned a Ph.D. in nursing research and organizational behavior from the University of Cincinnati.

Pam Soltis, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida, will share the 2016 Darwin-Wallace Medal from the Linnean Society of London with her husband Doug, a Distinguished Professor of biology at the university. The award honors major accomplishments in the field of evolutionary biology. The couple’s research focuses on the evolutionary diversification of flowering plants.

Pam Soltis also serves as curator at the Florida Museum and as director of the university’s Biodiversity Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in botany from the University of Kansas.

Shirley T. Frye, president of the board of directors of the North Carolina A&T State University Foundation, is having the YWCA building in Greensboro, North Carolina, named in her honor. She served on the national YWCA board for 20 years.

Frye is a graduate of North Carolina A&T State University and previously served as assistant vice chancellor for development and university relations and as executive assistant to the chancellor.

Cecilia Mo, an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, was selected as the winner of the award for the Best Article on Political Behavior, presented by the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of the American Political Science Association. She will be honored at the section’s annual meeting in Philadelphia on September 2.

Dr. Mo is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She holds master’s degrees from Loyola Marymount University, Harvard University, and Stanford University. She earned a Ph.D. in political economics from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.