Last modified: Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Five honored with 2010 Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb. 10, 2010
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Recipients of the Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award this year are Brian D'Onofrio (Psychological and Brain Sciences), Christiane Gruber (Art History and International Studies), Ho-fung Hung (Sociology and East Asian Languages and Culture), Daniel Kearns (Biology) and Marissa Moorman (History).
Each faculty member has received a total of $14,500 from the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. This annual award enables faculty to enhance their research and recognizes junior faculty members who have devoted considerable time to IU's teaching, research and service missions.
"I'm delighted that we are able to recognize the extraordinary potential demonstrated by the prolific contributions of these five faculty," said Sarita Soni, vice provost for research. "They have each achieved remarkable accomplishments, even as they juggle the heavy demands that tenure-track faculty face in the early years of their careers."
"The university faces challenges in retaining the very best of its young faculty members," said Tom Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. "These awards recognize our exceptionally talented assistant professors and provide resources enabling them to continue their excellent research and scholarship in Bloomington."
Brian D'Onofrio
D'Onofrio joined IU in 2005 as an assistant professor in the clinical sciences area of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences after working as a predoctoral clinical intern at Harvard Medical School/Children's Hospital in Boston. He completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 2005 from the University of Virginia. His research explores the causes of child and adolescent psychological problems through genetically informed designs, longitudinal analyses and intervention studies. D'Onofrio's research has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression and Indiana University. His research is published in some of the most prestigious psychology, psychiatry and sociology journals. This past year he became a member of the British Academy of Science Family Patterns and Public Policy Working Group, which focuses on the role of social science research in family policy. For more information on D'Onofrio, visit https://psych.indiana.edu/faculty/pages/donofrio.asp.
Christiane Gruber
Gruber joined IU in 2005 as an assistant professor of Islamic art in the Department of Art History in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, as well as an assistant professor in international studies. She completed her Ph.D. in Islamic art history at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her position at IU, she has worked at the Kunsthistorisches Institut/Max-Plank-Gesellschaft Foundation in Florence on the research project Crossing Boundaries, Creating Images: In Search of the Prophet Muhammad in Literary and Visual Traditions. Her research interests in texts and images of the Prophet Muhammad are reflected in her publications. Her first book, The Timurid Book of Ascension: A Study of Text and Image in a Pan-Asian Context, provides an overview of Islamic ascension texts and images, as well as a careful analysis of a Turco-Persian illustrated Book of Ascension produced in Herat, ca. 1436. Her second book, The Ilkhanid Book of Ascension: A Persian-Sunni Devotional Tale, analyzes texts and images of Muhammad's ascension in the medieval Persian world, underscoring how the theme and paintings of the ascension could be used for procedures of conversion to Sunni Islam during the Ilkhanid period. She has written extensively; her work is included in a number of journals, books, conference proceedings and edited volumes. For more information on Gruber, visit https://www.indiana.edu/~arthist/faculty/gruber.shtml.
Ho-fung Hung
Hung joined IU as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in 2005 after a year on the faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. Hung's research and publications are on contentious politics, globalization, nationalism and social theory. His current projects include examining how the Confucianist legacy shaped China's trajectories of state formation and popular protests from the 18th century to the present, in contrast to the Western trajectories; the dynamics and limits of the current economic ascendancy of China, as well as its impact on global capitalism; and China's changing conception of nationhood in light of Beijing's contentious interaction with Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan since 1949. He also has published on many other topics, including the orientalist origins of classical social theories, globalization of epidemics and China's environmental movements. His latest books are China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism, published through Johns Hopkins University Press and a work in progress of Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Modernity and Popular Politics in Mid-Qing China, 1740-1839. He has been awarded this past year the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Best Research Paper Award, and an Honorable Mention, Best Article Award, all from the American Sociological Association. For more information on Hung, visit https://www.indiana.edu/~soc/zbio_Hung.shtml.
Daniel Kearns
After completing his Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Georgia in 2001, then serving as a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard University's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Kearns joined IU as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology in 2005. His research focuses on bacterial motility and the assembly, function and regulation of the bacterial flagellar motor. He has been supported through grants from METACyt Systems Microbiology and the National Science Foundation. Kearns has published his research in numerous journals in the field, such as Molecular Microbiology, Genes and Development, and Science; has been an invited presenter at many symposiums, talks and seminars; and has been involved in formal collaborations with colleagues throughout the country since 2003. For more information on Kearns, visit https://www.bio.indiana.edu/faculty/directory/profile.php?person=dbkearns.
Marissa Moorman
After completing her Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota in 2004, Moorman joined IU as an assistant professor in the Department of History and the African Studies Program, as well as an affiliate faculty of the Department of Gender Studies. She is an historian of southern Africa. Her research focuses on the intersection between politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola as presented in her first book, Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945-Recent Times. She is currently working on a book project titled Tuning in to Nation, which looks at the relationship between the technology of radio and the shifting politics of southern Africa as anti-colonial movements established independent states in the context of a region newly charged by Cold War politics. She is coordinating an international collaboration, tentatively called Kuduro in Transatlantic Translation, that studies the contemporary music and dance genre, kuduro, in Angola and as it has been adapted in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), Lisbon, Paris, Amsterdam and New York. Since at IU, Moorman has been the recipient of the Trustees Teaching Award, Meritorious Service Award, New Frontiers Grant in the Arts and Humanities, as well as summer research grants for Project on African Expressive Traditions and the President's Council on International on International Programs (PCIP). For more information on Moorman, see https://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/faculty/moorman.shtml.
Outstanding Junior Faculty Award Information
Monetary support is provided through the combination of three different grants totaling approximately $14,500: a Summer Faculty Fellowship of up to $8,000; a Faculty Grant-in-Aid of Research in the amount of $2,500 for the academic year; and a $4,000 grant-in-aid or released-time award.
The awards are designed to assist untenured, tenure-track faculty to enhance their research programs prior to tenure. Awards will be given to junior faculty members who show promise of achieving great distinction as scholars or artists.
Candidates should have been at Indiana University for at least one academic year and demonstrate commitment to all three areas of teaching, research, and service, and show evidence of this in the materials submitted.
For more information on the award, see https://www.indiana.edu/~vpfaa/awards.shtml or e-mail vpfaa@indiana.edu.
