CEMS HONORS AND AWARDS 2021

Dr. Jianke Yang, the new Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, has been named University Distinguished Professor (UDP)—the highest academic honor that UVM can bestow upon a member of the faculty. Holders of this title are recognized as not only having achieved international eminence within their respective fi elds of study but for the truly transformative nature of their contributions to the advancement of knowledge. These faculty members are considered top scholars who have excelled in their disciplines.

Professor Yang received his Ph.D. from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 and has been a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics since 1994. He was selected as University Scholar in 2017, appointed as the Williams Professor of Mathematics in 2019, and elected as Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2020.

Dr. Yang is a pioneer in the study of nonlinear optics in complex media waves, nonlinear photonics and parity-time optics. He has contributed to our understanding of the way light beams can be shaped and redirected through interactions with nonlinear materials. His work as an applied mathematician has been described by his peers as “crucial to the development of all-optical computing systems for image processing and parallel processing problems.”

Dr. Josh Bongard was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize in Engineering and Applied Sciences. This international distinction is awarded annually to six research teams whose PNAS articles have made outstanding contributions to their fi elds. Using AI, a cell-based construction kit, and frog stem cells, Dr. Bongard and his coauthors designed and evolved in silico structures capable of locomotion, object manipulation, object transport, and collective behavior.

Civil and Environmental Professor Eric Hernandez was named Presidentelect for the New England chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). Join us in congratulating Eric and read more about the organization’s work at eeri.org

Peter Dodds was elected to the 2021 Fellows of the Network Science Society at the Netsci Conference for “foundational contributions to both the theoretical and experimental study of networks, and especially the growth, structure, and spread of information in social networks, both on- and offl ine.”

Lisa Dion has been awarded the Athena Young Professional Award from the Vermont Central Chamber of Commerce.

Juniper Lovato and Laurent Hebert-Dufresne are recipients of 2021 International Society for Artifi cial Life Exceptional Service awards.

KC Williams , pictured here with Maria Del Sol Nava and Max Cordes Galbraith at the inaugural Leadership Retreat for CEMS 50 mentors and student club leaders, has taken on the role of Assistant Dean for Equity, Belonging, and Student Engagement and as a Lecturer, College of Education and Social Services.

DONNA RIZZO NAMED 2021 – 2022 UNIVERSITY SCHOLAR

The University of Vermont Graduate College announced the 2021-2022 University Scholars—a program which recognizes distinguished UVM faculty members for sustained excellence in research, scholarship, and creative arts.

Dr. Rizzo is a Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and in 2013 was appointed as the Dorothean Chair in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. Her research focuses on the development and application of new machine-learning tools to improve the understanding of human-induced changes on natural systems and the way we design, monitor, and make decisions about these systems. Rizzo has over 25 years of experience with artificial intelligence, geostatistics, and optimization technologies and 30 years of experience in water resources and the visualization of really large data sets. Since the completion of her doctoral degree at the University of Vermont, her post-Ph.D. path has not been traditional for a tenure-track faculty. In 1994, she co-founded a small Vermont business to help speed the diffusion of research and new technologies into environmental practice. She worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the 1998 and 2011 Vermont floods.

Dr. Rizzo sets an exemplary standard for successfully working across disciplines. Since arriving at UVM in 2002, she and her students have worked collaboratively with colleagues across five different UVM colleges, using a variety of machine-learning tools to tackle multi-scale problems, including:

• the evaluation of human impacts to surface waters and groundwater • lake cyanobacteria bloom research • disease risk transmission • serious illness conversations to help understand and incentivize high-quality communication.

She loves working with students on applied research. Dr. Rizzo has supported scholarships and research opportunities for more than 200+ UVM undergraduates over the past 15 years and is an active and sought-after teacher, advisor, and mentor. To date, she has advised over 47 graduate students and postdocs and received the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award in 2014.

CAITLIN GRASSO WINS A NSF GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

Caitlin Grasso has won one of the 2021 National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. The UVM Ph.D candidate works with CEMS professor Josh Bongard on artificial intelligence (AI).

Grasso also works with The Proteus Institute, which is dedicated to facilitating the creation of bio-inspired AI. The Proteus Institute studies embodied plasticity: how multi-level change supports intelligence in protean systems (cells, organs, organisms, and ecologies), and how best to channel those discoveries into protean machines (robots and artificial biological constructs) and algorithms (machine learning methods).

Caitlin Grasso with images from her research