Greetings from Boston.

I am delighted to announce that the recipient of this year’s S. Earl Brown Staff Award is Suzanne Mikos. We like to make a big surprise splash with these awards but when the departmental fiscal officer is the awardee it is very difficult to pull off such a surprise – so the best we could do was an announcement at last Monday’s staff meeting. This a very well-deserved award, and we are proud to celebrate our dear colleague Earl Brown’s memory in this way. Suzanne makes our job here in the office a lot of fun while adhering to the highest standards in all our practices.

As announced earlier, Dr. Zhengyu Liu has accepted the position as named chair, and will join us in August as the Robert Max Thomas Professor.

Calvin Tribby’s dissertation “Activity Spaces, Route Choices, and Neighborhoods: Assessing the Built Environment Associations with Walking Trips” has tied in for first place of the 2017 PhD-level Jacques May Dissertation Prize of the Health and Medical Specialty Group of the AAG, congratulations!

This honor will be conferred at the HMGSG business meeting, which will be held today Friday April 7, from 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM in Simmons, Marriott. Calvin’s adviser is Harvey Miller. If you are here at the AAG and have a chance to congratulate Calvin please do so!

Zack Paganini, defended his M.A. this week. Zack's thesis, titled "Underwater: Using Ethnography to Investigate Intersections of Race and Resilience in the Case of the National Flood Insurance Program in Canarsie, Brooklyn", investigates flood-related resilience planning in terms of a broader history of racialized housing inequalities in the U.S.  Zack's committee consisted of Becky Mansfield, Darla Munroe, and Miranda Martinez (Comp Stds). His adviser is Mat Coleman.

Steven Quiring has received a grant from the Risk Institute for his proposed work on “Improved Power Outage Modeling to Support Risk Management for Electrical Utilities.” The work is coauthored with Dr. Seth Guikema (Michigan), Jordan Pino and Stephen Shield.