A Trio of Women Faculty Members Honored With Prestigious Awards

Gul E. Kremer, the C.G. “Turk” & Joyce A. Therkildsen Department Chair in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University, was chosen to receive the 2016 Kos Ishii-Toshiba Award for engineering design. The award is presented by the Design Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Kremer who has taught at Pennsylvania State University for the past 16 years, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul. She earned an MBA at Istanbul University and a Ph.D. from what is now the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Jessica Blois, an assistant professor of life and environmental sciences in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of California, Merced, has been selected to receive the MacArthur & Wilson Award from the International Biogeography Society. The award  honors a scholar in biogeography who has received his or her Ph.D. over the past 12 years and has made significant contributions to the discipline.

Dr. Blois is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego. She holds a master’s degree from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, and a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University.

Jeanna Matthews, an associate professor of computer science at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, received the Rhina P. Espaillat Award from the Poetry Center at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. The award honors poems written in Spanish or poems written in English that have been translated into Spanish. Dr. Matthews was honored for her Spanish-language poem “Winter’s Gifts” from her collection Playing Hard to Get and Other Sins.

Dr. Matthews holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.