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The Indiana Daily Student

IU names five Outstanding Junior Faculty

IU announced Wednesday that five professors from different departments have been named Outstanding Junior Faculty for the ?2014-15 year.

The award is given by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. The award recognizes faculty who are developing nationally recognized programs, research or scholarship, according to a University press release.

The five recipients are all assistant professors, and they include Matthew Baggetta in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Dominick DiOrio in the Jacobs School of Music, Mary Murphy in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Judy Qiu in the School of Informatics and Computing and Babak Seradjeh in the Department of Physics.

The award provides a grant of $15,000 that faculty use to support their research or programs.

“These five Outstanding Junior Faculty Award recipients rose to the top among an extraordinary field of candidates,” Tom Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs, said in the press release. “The faculty review committee was challenged to select from so many superb nominees, all of whom have demonstrated solid accomplishments and exceptional promise.”

Matthew Baggetta

Baggetta’s work focuses on voluntary organizations and how they affect their members and society. He has worked closely with the Sierra Club and conducted studies on different chapters of the organization.

He has also studied local community choirs and campus student groups. His work has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology and Perspectives on Politics, according to the release.

Baggetta has been a SPEA faculty member since 2010 and has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Notre Dame. He also has a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.

Dominick DiOrio

DiOrio mentors graduate choral conducting majors and teaches score reading, choral literature and conducting, according to the release.

He directs NOTUS, the IU Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. The chorus focuses on the work of living composers. Under his leadership, the chorus has been able to perform both regional and national conferences of the American Choral Directors Association and on the Distinguished Concerts International New York Artist Series at Carnegie Hall, according to the release.

DiOrio has been an IU faculty member since 2012 and earned a bachelor’s degree in conducting from Ithaca College. He also earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in conducting from Yale University.

Mary

Murphy

Murphy’s work and research explores diversity and how it works in society. She also pitched the “cues hypothesis,” which states that situational cues, such as physical arrangements or the underlying norms of an organization, can affect the meaning and value that people see in their social identity.

Her research also examines how to have productive group interactions and friendship in a diverse world, according to the press release.

Murphy has been a Bloomington faculty member since 2012. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and her master’s and Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University.

Judy Qiu

Qiu has focused her research on data-intensive computing, specifically with cloud and multicore technologies in the life sciences, according to a press release.

She is also a co-principal investigator for a $5 million National Science Foundation research project on cyberinfrastructure. She also works as the assistant director of Digital Science Center.

She earned an undergraduate degree from Beihang University and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Syracuse University.

Babak

Seradjeh

Seradjeh conducts research in condensed matter theory, especially related to superconductors. He uses multiple techniques to understand the fundamental principles in charge of these systems and the application of their properties.

Seradjeh has been an IU faculty member since 2011. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sharif University of Technology and a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in Canada.

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