JBHE: Latest News for 12/11/08

Honors and Awards

• The Fisk University Jubilee Singers were awarded the National Medal of Arts in a White House ceremony. The choral group, founded in 1871, has raised millions of dollars for the university. The group has recorded many albums and performed all over the world including a command performance for Queen Victoria of England.

• Mary M. Atwater, a professor of science education at the University of Georgia, was named an inaugural fellow of the American Educational Research Association for her outstanding contributions to education research.

Dr. Atwater is a graduate of Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She holds a master’s degree in organic chemistry from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate in science education from North Carolina State University.

• Earl Smith, Rubin Professor and director of American ethnic studies at Wake Forest University, received the 2008 Book Award from the North American Society for the Study of Sport. Professor Smith, who is now a visiting professor at Colgate University, was honored for his book Race, Sport, and the American Dream.

• Michael Waul, a senior at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Waul, a native of Jamaica, was the only Caribbean student to win a Rhodes Scholarship this year. He plans to study for a master’s degree in medicinal chemistry at Oxford University.

• Donald E. Wilson is senior vice president for health sciences at Howard University and John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He is the recipient of the Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

• John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus of history at Duke University, is having a new park in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, named in his honor. The John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park is dedicated to those who lost their lives in the 1921 Tulsa race riot.