Four Women Scholars Earn Prestigious Awards

Myra Blanco, director of the Safety and Human Factors Engineering Group of the Center for Truck and Bus Safety at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, has been chosen to receive the J. Cordell Breed Award for Women Leaders from SAE International. The association of automotive and aerospace engineers will present the award at its World Congress in Detroit in April.

Dr. Blanco is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez and holds a Ph.D. in human factors engineering from Virginia Tech.

Deborah A. Boehm, an assistant professor of anthropology and women’s studies at the University of Nevada in Reno, was the recipient of the Ruth Benedict Global Citizenship Award from the Center for Public Anthropology. She is the author of Intimate Migrations: Gender, Family, and Illegality Among Transnational Mexicans (New York University Press, 2012).

Dr. Boehm holds a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico.

Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation. She was honored for her work on the ozone layer in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Professor Solomon is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Darby Dickerson, dean of the Texas Tech University School of Law, was honored by the Association of Legal Writing Directors. She is the first recipient of the Darby Dickerson Award for Revolutionary Change in Legal Writing. Before coming to Texas Tech in 2011, she was dean of the Stetson University College of Law in Tampa.

Dean Dickerson holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. She is a graduate of the Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was the senior managing editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review.