Points of Pride

The School of Arts and Sciences is extremely proud of all of the prestigious accomplishments of our faculty and students. These achievements illustrate excellence in the areas of research and scholarship, service and teaching. Listed below is a sampling of some of the celebrated successes of our faculty and students.

School of Arts and Sciences Faculty Awards and Highlights

• Tufts boasts more than 10 Fulbright Fellows in recent years.
• 9 members of the faculty have been admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, including President Lawrence S. Bacow, Jane Bernstein, Madeline Caviness, Daniel Dennett, Ray Jackendoff, Laurence Senelick, Martin Sherwin, and Nils Yngve Wessell.
• 2 members of the faculty have been recognized with MacArthur Awards: Jay Cantor and Ayesha Jalal.
• Mitch McVey, Assistant Professor of Biology, received in 2007 a National Science Foundation CAREER award, which will fund the research that Dr. McVey's lab is doing to discern how different genetic pathways dynamically interact to repair damaged DNA. In addition, the award will be utilized to develop a mentoring and outreach program within the Biology Department to encourage students to pursue research-oriented scientific careers.
• In 2008, David Walt, a Professor in the Department of Chemistry, was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2006, he was recognized with a prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Grant.
• Martin J. Sherwin, Professor in the Department of History, and biographer Kai Bird have been awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2006), their book on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the development and use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.
• Marina Bers, Assistant Professor of Child Development, was one of 20 people in the United States to receive the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given by the US government to promising and groundbreaking investigators who are starting their independent research careers.
• Virginia Jackson, Associate Professor of English, was recently awarded the 2006 Christian Gauss Award for the Best Book in Literary Criticism by Phi Beta Kappa.
• In recent years, the Tufts faculty has included:
  • 8 Ford Foundation Fellows,
  • 6 Guggenheim Fellows,
  • 2 National Endowment for the Humanities Residents,
  • 11 Rockefeller Fellows,
  • 1 Alexander von Humbolt Fellow, and
  • numerous other honors.

School of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Awards and Highlights

• Roughly 40% of Tufts undergraduates have an overseas study experience, placing Tufts among the top five research universities. The Kaplan College Guide named Tufts one of America's 25 Hot Schools, recognizing it as the "Hottest for Studying Abroad."
• Tufts is an acknowledged leader in producing Peace Corps volunteers, among the top five colleges and universities in recent years.
• In recent years, Tufts has produced:
  • More than 175 Fulbright Scholars - Tufts has been among the top five universities in producing Fulbright Scholars for some time
  • 4 Truman Scholars (The Truman Scholarship is a congressionally funded scholarship recognizing extraordinary leadership and public service.)
  • 1 Rhodes Scholar
  • 4 Beinecke Scholars
  • 3 Goldwater Scholars
  • 2 Luce Scholars
• The School of Arts and Sciences has experienced a record applicant pool for undergraduate admissions in 12 of the past 13 years.

School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Awards and Highlights

• In 2007-2008, GSAS awarded 39 doctoral degrees (28% more than ten years ago) and 305 masters degrees (an increase of 17%).
• Three Tufts faculty members and a graduate alumna received four of the five annual awards given by the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS) during the 2007-2008 academic year. The award winners include Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Oratory and director of Graduate Studies for Drama and Dance (Graduate Faculty Teaching Award: Doctoral Level), Cristelle Baskins, associate professor and chair of Art and Art History (Graduate Faculty Teaching Award: Master's Level), Nalini Ambady, professor of Psychology (Geoffrey Marshall Mentoring Award), and Tali Ditman, G07 (Doctoral Dissertation Award). For more information on these awards, click here.
• The Tufts Child's Right to Thrive Student Group is spearheading a grass-roots effort to improve the lives of children living in orphanages and other institutional settings around the world. Led by graduate students from the child development and computer science departments, the group is partnering with a number of international organizations and is developing a web site which will provide direct-care givers and child work professionals with access to social services resources, medical information, and current scholarship in child development. For more information on the Child's Right to Thrive Student Group, click here.
• Alexander Keyel, a biology graduate student, received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship during the 2007-2008 academic year. For more information on Keyel's research, click here.
• Math graduate student Erin Munro received a NSF Mathematics Postdoctoral Fellowship. She was one of only 41 people in the United States to receive this fellowship.
• Chemistry graduate students Po-Chang Hsu and Shannon Stroble analyzed data from the Mars Phoenix Lander Mission during the summer of 2008. Hsu and Stroble, who conducted this work at NASA mission control in Arizona, are part of a broader research project led by Professor Samuel Kounaves. For more information on Professor Kounaves' research, click here.
• Drama graduate student Meron Langsner was one of only three individuals in the United States to receive an inaugural National New Play Network playwright residency in 2008. For more information on Langsner's work, click here.
• English graduate student Ashley Shelden was awarded a graduate fellowship from the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) for the 2008-2009 academic year. For more information on CHAT, click here.
• Neilesh Bose, a history graduate student, received a Diversity Dissertation Fellowship from the Center for Citizenship, Race, and Ethnicity Studies (CREST) at the College of Saint Rose in New York during the 2007-2008 academic year. For more information on Bose's research, click here.