Huskers who earned recent honors include Jayden Barth, Brian Bornstein, Yanbing Dong, Megan Elliott, Gwendolyn Foster, Jessica Hovoty, Julia McQuillan, Jordan Patt, Nancy Shank and Tiffany Truong.
Faculty/Staff
Brian Bornstein, professor of psychology and director of the Law-Psychology Program, has been selected as a program officer for the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences Program. His appointment will begin in January 2018.
Gwendolyn Foster, professor of English, has been selected to screen her film, “Sleeping with the Fishes,” at the Studio 44 Short Film Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, Aug. 15-20. Films featured in the festival, which is hosted by the Stockholm Culture Festival, are screened by invitation only. The festival is a wide-ranging event and includes animation, narrative, documentary, experimental video/film, feminist, queer and anti-racist films. Only 40 films by video artists in 15 countries were selected to participate. “Sleeping with the Fishes” is a surrealist collage in honor of Luis Buñuel and André Breton. Watch Foster’s video below.
- Nancy Shank, associate director of the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center, will present findings from the 2017 Lincoln Vital Signs report during the Prosper Lincoln Summit Aug. 23 at Pinnacle Bank Arena. Shank is lead author of the report.
Students
Yanbing Dong, a doctor of musical arts student, won the Golden Classical Music Awards International Competition in piano (senior division) and will be performing in New York City at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 4. The North America-based competition is open to all nationalities in strings, piano, wind, vocal and chamber categories. Multiple winners are chosen, but only the top winner of each group is invited to perform at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. The recordings Dong used for the competition included Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, Franz Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy,” and Joseph Haydn’s Sonata in C Major. Paul Barnes, professor of piano, is Dong’s instructor. Learn more about this award.
Jessica Hovoty and Tiffany Truong were named winners of the 2017 Richard Holland Future Scientist Award from the Nebraska Coalition for Lifesaving Cures at the Institutional Development Award Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence Program conference Aug. 8 in Nebraska City. Hovoty, a microbiology major, received third place for her oral presentation and Truong, a biochemistry major, received honorable mention for her poster presentation. Students were judged on oral and poster presentations summarizing their summer research work conducted as scholars of the INBRE program. The student scholars are selected for the two-year training program, which is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health and is designed to prepare students for graduate school.
Jadyn Johnson, a senior music education major, is part of Adrenaline, a barbershop quartet that won the 2017 Rising Star Competition (International Youth Division). The competition is part of the Sweet Adelines International Quartet Contest, held Aug. 5 at the University of Maryland. Read more about Johnson and how she got started singing in the quartet.
Jordan Patt, a dance and journalism major, and Jayden Barth, a sociology major, will give talks at the TEDx Youth@Lincoln event Saturday. Faculty members Megan Elliott, director of Johny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, and Julia McQuillan, professor and chair of the department of sociology, also will be speaking.
This column is a regular Friday feature of Nebraska Today. Faculty, staff and students can submit achievements to be considered for this column via email to achievements@unl.edu. For more information, call 402-472-8515.
