Sunday, April 16, 2017
UNH faculty honors

UNH faculty honors


Top of page: Carnegie Fellow Ken Johnson, professor of sociology

Above, top to bottom: CAREER award winners John Gibson, associate professor of mathematics; Yaning Li, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Harish Vashisth, assistant professor of chemical engineering

Ken Johnson, professor of sociology and senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy, was named a Carnegie Fellow. The fellowship — one of the most prestigious and generous in the social sciences — will fund Johnson’s research on demographic shifts in rural America.

Physics professor Harlan Spence, director of UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), received two high-profile appointments in 2016. He was named to the Space Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences and was elected to serve as a member of the board of trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

The American Geophysical Union named physics professor and EOS Space Science Center director Lynn Kistler a Fellow.

The National Science Foundation honored three faculty members with Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, awards. Associate professor of mathematics John Gibson seeks to understand turbulent flows; assistant professor of mechanical engineering Yaning Li studies honeycomb-like materials called auxetic chiral composites; and Harish Vashisth, assistant professor of chemical engineering, simulates molecules of nucleic acids. Vashisth was also granted access to the Anton 2 supercomputer, located at the University of Pittsburgh, through a competitive process.

Andy Armstrong, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) co-director of the UNH/NOAA Joint Hydrographic Center, holds perhaps the most unique honor of the past year: a basin on the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico was named for him. Armstrong was captain and chief hydrographer on the NOAA ship that first mapped the Armstrong Basin, about 100 miles south of Galveston, Texas, in 1992.