Honoring Outstanding Sciences Faculty

NC State recognized several outstanding College of Sciences faculty members at the 2016 Celebration of Faculty Excellence on May 3. The annual event honors faculty who have won prestigious state, national and international honors throughout the academic year.

During the event, Chancellor Randy Woodson presented five professors with the Alexander Quarles Holladay Medal for Excellence, NC State’s highest honor in recognition of faculty achievement. Among them was Robert Anholt, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences.

Anholt joined the NC State faculty in 1993 and is the director of the Keck Center for Behavioral Biology, one of the world’s premier centers for interdisciplinary studies on animal behavior. His research focuses on state-of-the-art genomic strategies and studies on a wide range of phenotypes, including the genetic underpinnings of behaviors and human disease models and the identification of genetic risk factors associated with environmental exposures, including sensitivity to alcohol and drugs.

Provost Warwick A. Arden also recognized several other Sciences faculty members at the event:

• Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, was honored for receiving the Wolf Prize in Agriculture. The prize is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for academic achievement.

• Four faculty members were recognized for receiving the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2015-16. The award, also known as the NSF CAREER Award, is one of the highest awards the foundation bestows upon young faculty in the sciences. The recipients were Lorena Bociu, assistant professor of mathematics; Elena Jakubikova, assistant professor of chemistry; Eric Laber, assistant professor of statistics; and Rui Song, assistant professor of statistics.

• Alyson Wilson, professor of statistics, was honored for being named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

• David Buchwalter, associate professor of biological sciences, and Stefan Franzen, professor of chemistry, were honored for receiving the Fulbright Scholars fellowship.

• NC State physicists Chris Gould and Albert Young were recognized for being part of an international team of researchers who won the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the richest award in the field. The group was working to detect and study the elusive neutrino.

2016 marks the fifth year of the Celebration of Faculty Excellence. In recognition of all honored faculty, the university lit the Memorial Belltower red for the night.

(See NC State News for additional information.)