Recent awards

The Peace, War, and Social Conflict section of the American Sociological Association has awarded Meredith Kleykamp the 2010 outstanding article award for "A Great Place to Start? The Effect of Prior Military Service on Hiring", published in Armed Forces & Society. The article examined the effect of prior military service on hiring for entry-level jobs. The research used an audit method in which resumes differing only in prior military experience were faxed to employers in response to an advertised position.

The Political Economy of the World System Section of the American Sociological Association has announced that Unveiling Inequality by Patricio Korzeniewicz and Tim Moran (UMd Ph.D. 1996) has won the 2010 best book award. The award noted the book's contribution to explaining diverging patterns of inequality across countries from a world-historical and institutionalist perspective. The authors see the change in within-country inequality and between-country inequality not as two separate processes, as many in the field do, but as intertwined developments that have to be examined historically and holistically.

The Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association has announced that John Robinson is the 2010 recipient of the William F. Ogburn Career Achievement Award. The award "recognizes a sustained body of research that has provided an outstanding contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the area of sociology of communications or the sociology of information technology."

Harriet Presser was awarded the Jessie Bernard award at the August 2010 meetings of the American Sociological Association. The Jessie Bernard Award has been given for thirty years in recognition of scholarly work that “has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society”. Harriet has been a Professor of Sociology at Maryland since 1976 and was named Distinguished University Professor in 1999. She was the founding Director of the Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality (now the Maryland Population Research Center).

Harriet adds this honor to numerous other career awards including election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Association of University Women's 2007 Founders Distinguished Senior Scholar Award. Last year the Population Association of America established the Harriet B. Presser award to honor scholars who have done distinguished research on gender and demographic issues.

Barbara Meeker organized the panels of the Mathematical Sociology Section at the 2010 American Sociological Association` in Atlanta. Barbara has served as chair of the section this year. She previously was chair of the Social Psychology section. Last year she helped organize a session on mathematical sociology at the annual joint meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and American Mathematical Society. This was the first time a sociology session had appeared in the mathematics meeting.

Reeve Vanneman was awarded the 2010 BSOS outstanding teaching - mentorship award.

Patricia Hill Collins presided over the 104th meeting of the American Sociological Association August 8-11, 2009. Pat spoke on "the new politics of community" and challenged us to consider how all of our work is informed by the concept of community.

Pat was recently awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her honorary degree cited her as a "major social theorist whose scholarship, research and activism have focused on the intersecting power relations of race, gender, social class, sexuality and nationality."

George Ritzer is the new chair of the ASA section on the history of sociology. This is the fourth ASA section that George has chaired! Previously, the ASA section on Global and Transnational Sociology elected George its first chair. George has also served as chair of the Theory Section and the Section on Organizations and Occupations.

Alan Neustadtl has heard that NSF has recommended funding “Supporting A Nation of Neighbors with Community Analysis Visualization Environment” on which he is a co-PI with Ben Schneiderman.

Kris Marsh has won a Dean's Initiative award to study the mental health and well-being of black middle class adolescents who live in three racially diverse settings: predominantly black, mixed-racial, and predominantly white neighborhoods and schools.

The Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology awarded Bill Falk the 2009 Robert Ezra Park Award for Sociological Practice at its annual meeting October 8-10, 2009 in San Antonio. The award recognizes Bill's work on community, especially in rural areas and the American South.  

Julie Park has had multiple successes with research grants lately. She won a 2010 Maryland Research and Scholarship Award (RASA) to use "double cohort" methods (comparing birth cohorts with immigration year cohorts) to study rates of Mexican-American and Central American immigrants' escape from poverty. She also won a Dean's Initiative award for a planning grant that connects her interests in immigration with Maryland's long-standing expertise in time-use studies.

Sonal Desai together with co-PI Reeve Vanneman, have received two $3 million NIH grants to fund continuation of the India Human Development Survey. The first grant funds a youth supplement that will investigate transitions to adulthood, focusing on family and peer influences in decisions about jobs, marriages, and college. The second grant will enable a re-interview of the original 41,554 households interviewed in 2005.

The National Science Foundation awarded Jerry Hage and the Center for Innovation a grant to study how medical research can evaluate its potential social and economic benefits in real time -- before the project is completed and while there is still time to adjust how the research team is working.

Jeff Lucas also has a recent NSF grant to study how treatment for psychiatric disorders affects stigmas and perceptions of a person's status characteristics. The research will be conducted in the department's experimental laboratory for group processes.

David Segal and the Center for Research on Military Organization received three quarters of a million dollars from the Defense Department to fund "Social Trends and Social Change in the United States: Impacts on Army Manpower, Personnel, and Operations." This study looks at how changes in demography, health, gender roles, the economy, and higher education affect how the army recruits, retains, and manages soldiers and supports their families.

The National Science Foundation has selected Stanley Presser to serve a three-year term on the Advisory Committee for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate.