Kudos

You have to thank Carol Burnett for Michelle Ellsworth’s art. At least in part. Ellsworth, associate professor of dance at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been captivated by dance since she was 7, when she first saw the Ernest Flat Dancers on The Carol Burnett Show. In between the show’s segments, jazz-dance sequences functioned as segues. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. That’s what I want to do for a living.’”

Melanie Sarah Adams had a hunch: Maybe today’s conventional agricultural practices not only degrade the Earth’s environment and threaten future food security but also produce nutritionally imbalanced foods that harm human health.

Before coming to CU, Courtnie Paschall had graduated from the Naval Academy, attained the rank of lieutenant and undergone years of flight training. Now, she’s graduating summa cum laude with a degree in neuroscience and a minor in electrical engineering. She is also the Outstanding Graduate for the College of Arts and Sciences for spring 2015.

Marcia Douglas, associate professor of English, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to pen a novel extrapolated from a minute, almost tossed-off, detail in Tell My Horse, a work by Zora Neale Hurston, written while Hurston was on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The news of a lifetime reached Elizabeth Fenn, chair of CU-Boulder’s history department, around 1 p.m. on April 20, just as she sat at her desk to eat her lunch from the University Memorial Center. An email from a New York Times reporter caught her attention: It said she’d won a Pulitzer Prize.

Brian Catlos isn’t a big believer in the “clash of civilizations” view of Western history, which posits that Muslim culture and values are fundamentally at odds with those of the so-called West. But neither does he have much truck with the rather nostalgic the idea that peace and harmony prevailed between the three religions during the Middle Ages. He is working on a book-length exploration of this research.

Aristotle may be the most influential philosopher in history, a cornerstone of Western philosophy. But at a time when many see the pursuit of money as a virtue in itself, some might dismiss him as an old Greek hippie. Mitzi Lee, associate professor of philosophy, has developed “creative and persuasive” ideas about understanding Aristotle, and she’s won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete a book about justice as it relates to Aristotle’s ideas on ethics—and how to live a good life.

Receiving the honor of being named the inaugural Timmerhaus Teaching Ambassador is Noah Finkelstein, President’s Teaching Scholar and professor of physics at CU-Boulder. “I’m profoundly honored by this award, and the explicit recognition and attention to education as a core enterprise of the University of Colorado,” Finkelstein said.

Myron Gutmann, a prominent historical demographer, has taken the helm of the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Gutmann, who became the institute’s director on Jan. 1, succeeds Jane Menken, a distinguished professor of sociology, who has led IBS since 2001. One of his key objectives is to spread the word, to “show the people of Colorado that we are making an important investment in things that have value for them.”

In a national project designed to help communities cope with extreme events, Liesel Ritchie, associate director for research at the Natural Hazards Center in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been chosen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to serve as a Disaster Resilience Fellow.