University community reports recent honors, publications, presentations

For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, students and alumni.

Recent presentations, books and honors include the following:

Presentations

Megan Gaffney, associate librarian and coordinator, Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery, presented the talk “Interlibrary Loan between the United States and Latin America: The Current Landscape.” She also presented “Assessing Turnaround Time and User Satisfaction at the University of Delaware” as part of a panel called “Assessment Plans and Interlibrary Loan: A Round Peg in a Square Box?” Both presentations were part of the OCLC Resource Sharing Conference, held March 14-16, 2017 in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Polly Weir, director of Conference Services, and Bill Sullivan, managing director of the Marriott Courtyard at UD, addressed the Association of Collegiate Conference and Events Directors-International (ACCED-I) 37th annual conference March 26-29. ACCED-I consists of more than 1,500 campus professionals who design, market, coordinate and plan conferences and special events on the campuses of colleges and universities around the world. It is the premiere educational and networking event for collegiate conference and events professionals. The topic of this year’s conference was “operation of a conference center and hotel in an educational environment with a variety of contract service providers; and how to maximize the value and service level to customers.”

Media

Chrissi Rawak, director of Athletics and Recreation Services, was quoted in the article, “Women Make Progress in Filling Division I AD Jobs,” published March 27 in Sports Business Journal. Rawak, who is one of eight female athletic directors out of 52 NCAA Division I athletic directors hired in 2016, is quoted: “I’m in the position I’m in because there were many men who saw me as being qualified. Our universities are paying attention to the need for diversity in ways maybe they hadn’t before. The fact that we’re putting more women in position to have this kind of experience is important.”

Books

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor of theatre, has recently published (under his pseudonym Jean Bodin) a new collection of poems (in German) and drawings, Reiss doch die Tuer nicht so, edition lulu, Rochester, USA. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe writes, “The poetry is sharp, witty, focused, finely chiseled, with the same atmosphere of dense determination that’s characteristic for Haus’s theatre productions.… In a beautiful way, Haus’s poetry reaches beyond that more superficial level of poetry; our minds are transported, through his use of juxtaposition, contrast, surprising turns, and the abstract nature of words, beyond meaning into sound.” (Lumina Lina, XXI/1, New York)

Honors

A 2003 paper by the Tsu-Wei Chou, who is the Pierre S. du Pont Chair of Engineering at UD, and former research associate Chunyu Li is among the top-10 most-cited papers in the history of the International Journal of Solids and Structures. Li is now a researcher at Purdue University. They join researchers from Harvard and other top academic institutions on the list. As of March 27, the paper, “A Structural Mechanics Approach for the Analysis of Carbon Nanotubes,” had 910 citations and was fifth on the list according to the Scopus database. The work was published at a time when carbon nanotubes were beginning to attract attention as a novel material with potential application in a variety of fields. Chou and Li developed a structural mechanics approach for modeling carbon nanotubes, offering simplicity of concept and improved computational efficiency for analyzing deformation in these materials.

A 2007 paper by Lori Pollock, Alumni Distinguished Professor, and Vijay Shanker, professor, both in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and former students David ShepherdZachary Fry and Emily Hill has been recognized as the Most Influential Paper over the past 10 years from the sixth International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development. The paper, “Using Natural Language Program Analysis to Locate and Understand Action-Oriented Concerns,” describes a semi-automated concern location and comprehension tool, Find-Concept, designed to reduce the amount of time software developers spend on maintenance tasks and to increase their confidence in the results of these tasks. The award will be given at the 2017 conference on April 6. Shepherd is now senior principal scientist at ABB in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Fry is a senior scientist at GrammaTech in Ithaca, New York; and Hill is assistant professor of computer science at Drew University in New Jersey.

Alumna Paula Zusi, who earned her bachelor’s degree in apparel design in 1982, has been named chair of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, which represents more than 1,000 brands and is the public policy and political voice of the industry, its management and shareholders and its 4 million U.S. workers. Zusi is the global operations adviser, retail supply chain, for the Advent International private equity firm. She previously held senior executive positions with such companies as Ann Inc., the parent of Ann Taylor and Loft brands, and Liz Claiborne Inc.