Five Women Scholars at American Universities Earn Notable Honors

Susan Muaddi Darraj, an associate professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland, and a lecturer in the master’s degree program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has been selected as the winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. The winning entry, a short story collection entitled A Curious Land: Stories From Home, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2015. The stories relate the experiences of several generations of Palestinian families both in the Middle East and the United States.

An earlier collection, The Inheritance of Exile (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), is about Palestinian families in Philadelphia.

Bianca Bernstein, professor of counseling and counseling psychology at Arizona State University was named a 2014 Woman of the Year by Section for the Advancement of Women of the American Psychological Association. She was honored for her efforts to advance women in psychology and other scientific professions.

Professor Bernstein has been on the faculty at Arizona State University for 27 years. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and holds a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Susan V. Olesik, Dow Professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State University, received the 2014 National Award for Chromatography from the American Chemical Society. She has served on the faculty at Ohio State since 1986.

Professor Olesik is a graduate of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sheila Kennedy, professor of practice in the department of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received the inaugural Design Innovator Award from Architectural Record magazine. She is being honored for her work in advancing innovation in materials and new building types.

Professor Kennedy is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She earned a master of architecture degree from Harvard University.

Jada Bussey-Jones, an associate professor in the division of general medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, received the 2014 National Mentorship in Education Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine. She has been on the faculty at Emory since 1999.

Dr. Bussey-Jones is a graduate of Emory University, where she doubled majored in biology and sociology. She also earned her medical degree at Emory and completed clinical training at the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.