News of Note From Pitt

• Professor of Law Mary Crossley Named Scholar in Residence in Program Launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Network for Public Health Law

• Engineering Professor Piervincenzo Rizzo and Pitt Alumnus Xianglei Ni Receive Outstanding Paper Award from Society for Nondestructive Testing Research

• Junior Anthropology and Classics Major Sara Clark Wins UK Summer Fulbright Institute Award

PITTSBURGH—Behind the larger stories about the University of Pittsburgh are other stories of faculty, staff, and student achievement as well as information on Pitt programs reaching new levels of success. The following is a compilation of some of those stories.

Professor of Law Mary Crossley Named Scholar in Residence in Program Launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Network for Public Health Law

Professor of Law and former Pitt School of Law Dean Mary Crossley is one of six scholars in the nation to participate in Scholars in Residence, a fellowship program recently launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Network for Public Health Law. Designed to bring the expertise of legal scholars to assist public health agencies in tackling critical issues, the program also provides field experience to the scholars, who work with local and state health agencies on public health law issues related to chronic diseases, virus surveillance, and tuberculosis, among other topics.

Widely respected for her scholarship in disability and health law, Crossley will work with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to identify the most effective and innovative ways in which health officers can address the growing burden of chronic diseases through interventions targeting risk behaviors and the social determinants of health. Privacy laws and laws regulating the Internet are among the areas that Crossley will examine as she analyzes the legal questions raised by novel interventions. 

Engineering Professor Piervincenzo Rizzo and Pitt Alumnus Xianglei Ni Receive Outstanding Paper Award from Society for Nondestructive Testing

Piervincenzo Rizzo, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, is the corecipient of the 2013 Outstanding Paper Award from the American Society for Nondestructive Testing. Rizzo and coauthor Xianglei Ni (ENGR ’11G), senior riser and tendon engineer at INTECSEA, were recognized for their article titled “Use of Highly Nonlinear Solitary Waves in Nondestructive Testing,” which examines the feasibility of nondestructive testing of aluminum, concrete, and composites. Rizzo and Ni will receive the award at the American Society for Nondestructive Testing Annual Conference in Las Vegas in November 2013.

Junior Anthropology and Classics Major Sara Clark Wins UK Summer Fulbright Institute Award

Sara Clark, a junior majoring in anthropology and classics and minoring in religious studies, has been selected to attend the Fulbright Commission Durham University Summer Institute from June 30 to July 27, 2013. This is the third year a Pitt student has a received a competitive UK Summer Fulbright Institute award.

Located at Durham University in the United Kingdom, Clark—a native of Malvern, Pa.—will participate in a four-week cultural/academic program and archeological excavation project titled “The Northern Borders of Empire to the Making of the Middle Ages.” Clark’s interest in archeology and in drawing connections between artifacts and ancient cultures drew her to the program.

“I read Homer’s The Odyssey on ancient ceramics and realized that manifested on those artifacts were stories that articulated the wills of the Greeks,” said Clark. “These same themes are woven into Odysseus’s epic, and, like working on a puzzle, I began to piece together my understanding of the culture and the artifacts. These Greek narratives came alive.”

Durham University’s excavation project aims to investigate the character of the local population of the Roman town of Vinovium and the nearby fort of Binchester in Northern England. Clark and her colleagues will explore the connections between the fort and the town, examining how the border evolved from Roman to medieval times. The project also evaluates how archaeology may contribute to senses of identity in the region.

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6/20/13/mab/cjhm

Written by Melissa Carlson