Honors

Sahar Adish (Chemistry ’08) received a Peabody Award for a film documenting her family’s escape from the Taliban. The film focuses on how Adish’s family fled Afghanistan in the late 1990s because they violated Taliban law by home schooling her and several neighborhood children.

Jennifer A. Cano (Physics ’09) of Mansfield, Conn., Sean A. Cantrell (Physics ’09) of Williamsburg, Va., and Gary B. Shambat (Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering ’07) of Fairfax, Va., have been named Goldwater Scholars. The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship is a national scholarship valued at $7,500 a year for up to two years and supports study in mathematics, engineering and the natural sciences.

Nicole F. Hurd (PhD Religious Studies ’02), former director of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence and creator of U.Va.’s College Guide Program, received a Governor’s Volunteerism and Community Service Award for National Service from Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. The College Guide Program reaches out to high school students all over Virginia who aren’t otherwise college-bound and encourages them to go to college.

Biology professor Mike Menaker has won the 2007 Peter C. Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine, an award given by the Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine. The prize recognizes Menaker’s innovations in circadian biology and his findings on how light and dark govern and synchronize living clocks.

Todd Scanlon, assistant professor of environmental sciences, received a $449,800 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant for his novel environmental research. Scanlon plans to use the grant to examine nitrous oxide emissions on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and to investigate mercury transformation in Shenandoah National Park.