PLAUDITS
Susan Allen receives K-State's inaugural Susan M. Scott Community Leadership Award
Susan Allen, director of the nonviolence education program at K-State, recently received the inaugural Susan M. Scott Community Leadership Award from the School of Leadership Studies.
The award is named for the founding director of leadership studies at K-State, Susan Scott, and was established to honor those whose leadership is focused on bringing progressive change to communities.
Allen teaches Do Nonviolence -- Be the Change, the introductory course for K-State's certificate in nonviolence studies. She also conducts and is involved in several campus and community applied nonviolence programs, including the K-State Campaign for Nonviolence, Season for Nonviolence and noontime yoga and awareness meditation.
Allen is currently writing the text "Every Day Nonviolence" and has published foundational pieces on nonviolence education and media anthropology. Allen holds a doctorate in media anthropology from the University of Kansas.
Prior to becoming director of K-State's nonviolence education program, Allen worked from 1993 to 2006 at K-State's Women's Center, serving the last six years of her tenure as the center's director. She also has been a visiting associate professor at the National Institute of Multimedia Education in Tokyo, Japan; editor of Alliance, an ethnic newspaper at K-State; a legislative correspondent for former U.S. Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas; and a research intern at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Three K-State researchers honored
Research excellence has earned three K-State scientists honors from the university's chapter of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society.
Ryszard Jankowiak, professor of chemistry, and John Leslie, professor and head of the department of plant pathology, are the 2009 recipients of Sigma Xi's Outstanding Senior Scientist Award; Krista Walton, assistant professor of chemical engineering, is the recipient Sigma Xi's 2009 Outstanding Junior Scientist Award.
"The prestigious Outstanding Senior Scientist Award is only given to Sigma Xi members who have made outstanding contributions to scientific advancement and have demonstrated outstanding ability and accomplishments in scientific research in their fields," said Susan Sun, K-State professor of grain science and industry and chair of the Sigma Xi Award Committee.
The Outstanding Junior Scientist Award is given to Sigma Xi members who have demonstrated outstanding ability and accomplishments in scientific research in their fields within five years after receiving a doctoral degree, Sun said.
Jankowiak had a long, successful professional career before joining K-State's department of chemistry as a full professor in 2005. His current research interests are hole-burning spectroscopy and structural disorder in glasses and proteins; excitation energy and electron transfer in various photosynthetic antenna and reaction center complexes at low temperatures and high pressures; single molecule spectroscopy; and chemical carcinogenesis. He holds a doctorate in condensed matter physics from Technical University of Gdansk (Poland).
Leslie left industry for an assistant professor position in plant pathology at K-State in 1984, becoming head of the department in 2006. He maintains an active research program in the genetics of Fusarium. He has Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Walton joined K-State in 2006. Her research activities focus on various aspects of the design, synthesis and characterization of functional porous materials for use in applications including absorption separations, air purification, gas storage, chemical sensing and catalysis. Her research accomplishments were recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008 and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2009. She has a doctorate in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University.