Seven Women in Academia Honored With Prestigious Awards

Angela Morales, an English department faculty member at Glendale Community College in California, has been selected as the winner of the 2014 Nonfiction Book Prize presented by River Teeth, a journal of nonfiction narrative. The journal is based at Ashland University in Ohio.

Morales was honored for her collection of essays entitled The Girls in My Town, which will be published by the University of New Mexico Press. Morales is a graduate of the University of California, Davis and holds a master of fine arts degree in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa.

Naomi Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, has been awarded the 2015 R.W. Wood Prize from the Optical Society in Washington, D.C. She shares the award with her research partner Peter Nordlander, the Wiess Chair in Physics and Astronomy at Rice. The pair were recognized for their groundbreaking work in nanophotonics.

Professor Halas is a graduate of La Salle University in Philadelphia. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in physics from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

Maria A. Serrat, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy and pathology at Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, received the 2015 Basmajian Award from the American Association of Anatomists. The award honors early career scientists who have “made outstanding accomplishments in biomedical research or scholarship.

Dr. Serrat is a graduate of Miami University in Ohio, where she majored in anthropology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Kent State University in Ohio.

Kathleen Lane, an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Kansas has been selected to receive the 2015 Outstanding Leadership Award from the Council for Children With Behavioral Disorders. She will receive the award on April 9 at the council’s membership meeting in San Diego.

Dr. Lane  is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside, where she majored in psychology. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in education from the University of California, Riverside.

Carol Tonge Mack, assistant dean of recruitment and retention initiatives at the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, will be honored at the Women of the Diaspora Leadership Conference in Montego Bay, Jamaica, in October.

Mack, a native of Antigua, is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont, where she majored in history. She holds two master’s degrees from the University of New Hampshire.

Julie M. Goddard, assistant professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been selected to receive the 2015 Samuel Cate Prescott Award for outstanding research in food technology from the Institute of Food Technologists. Her research focuses on food packaging.

Dr. Goddard holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in food science from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Kathleen Matthews, recently received the William C. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the group’s annual meeting in Boston. Dr. Matthews is the Stewart Memorial Professor in Biosciences at Rice University in Houston. She was honored for her research on DNA-binding proteins and for mentoring young scientists in the field.

Professor Matthews has taught at Rice since 1972. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.