Seven Women Higher Education Scholars Honored With Prestigious Awards

Liliya Yatsunyk, an associate professor of chemistry at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, received the 2016 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. She joined the faculty at Swarthmore in 2007 and was promoted to associate professor in 2013.

Dr. Yatsunyk is a graduate of  Chernivtsi State University in Ukraine. She earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Univerity of Arizona.

Rose McLarney, an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama, was honored with the 2016 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing given out by the department of English at Morehead State University in Kentucky. She is the author of the poetry collection Its Day Being Gone (Penguin Books, 2015).

McLarney holds a master of fine arts degree from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. She is the poetry editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

M. Darby Dyar, the Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor and chair of the department of astronomy at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, received the G.K. Gilbert Award from the Geological Society of America in recognition of her research in planetary geology.

Dr. Dyar is a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Erika Marin-Spiotta, an associate professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected to receive the 2016 Sulzman Award for Excellence in Education and Mentoring from the American Geophysical Union. She will be honored at the association’s fall meeting in San Francisco in December.

Dr. Marin-Spiotta is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Helen Grundman, professor emerita of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, has been chosen to receive the M. Gweneth Humphreys Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Earlier this year, Dr. Grundman was named director of education and diversity in the Division of Meetings and Professional Services of the American Mathematical Society. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Viviana Gradinaru, an assistant professor of biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology, is the inaugural recipient of the Peter Gruss Young Investigator Award from the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.

Dr. Gradinaru joined the faculty at CalTech in 2012. She is a graduate of CalTech and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, received the Moses Mendelssohn Award from the Leo Baeck Institute for outstanding contributions to the study of German-Jewish culture.

Professor Heschel holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.