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Accolades 

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Congratulations to Suong Van Hoa, who was presented with the inaugural Nano-Academia Award at a ceremony April 21 at Montreal’s Palais des congrès. The award was part of the NanoQuebec-Nano 2008 summit taking place as part of a conference called INNO.08, and recognizes his three decades of groundbreaking research. As director of CONCOM, the Concordia Centre for Composites, Hoa has worked with major local and international companies. His work with Bell Helicopter earned him the NSERC Synergy Award in 2006. One of his most recent creations is a helicopter landing gear crosspiece that is a world first in load-bearing composites.

Sanjay Sharma, Dean of the John Molson School of Business, gave a talk on April 23 in Carrefour Desjardins as part of Earth Week. His subject was “Sustainability and Competitive Advantage.” He helped to establish corporate sustainability as a field of scholarship in the early 1990s, and consults on the topic for Fortune 500 corporations, governments and international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation.

The Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Michèle Thériault, and her team have increased the Gallery's multi-year funding from the Canada Council for the Arts by 43 per cent. The Council's program of Assistance to Museums and Public Art Galleries awards this funding every two years based on excellence in programming, publishing and management. “In all these areas, the Gallery received excellent reviews,” Thériault reported. “This funding is indispensable to the Gallery’s contemporary programming.”

The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities is giving Erica Lehrer (Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography & Museology) an honorable mention in their annual recognition of emerging scholars.

Robert E. Bradley, who was a Rhodes Scholar when he graduated from Concordia in 1979, gave a talk in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics on April 10. His subject was the legacy of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), who made theoretical as well as practical contributions to almost every branch of mathematics. Euler wrote 800 books and articles that fill more than 70 large volumes, and was a great pedagogue as well as an outstanding researcher, yet he is little known today. As for Bradley, he is a professor of mathematics at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Oxford University and completed his PhD at the University of Toronto.

On April 29 Concordia’s Media Relations Department issued a press release about the validation by George Vatistas (left), Kamran Siddiqui and Hamit Ait Abderrahmane of Nobel Prize winner J.J. Thomson’s 125-year-old theory on the stability of vortex rings (see April 17 Journal). Within minutes, the story caught the eye of media as far away as Spain and France. But it was Vatistas’s interview on the CBC Radio science show Quirks and Quarks that really connected him with fellow researchers. Following the interview he was flooded with emails from scientists who are working in similar areas of research. His findings are published this month in Physical Review Letters.

Frank Chalk (History, Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies) will be the Scholar in Residence for the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews’ March of Remembrance and Hope program this month. Sixty Canadian students from diverse backgrounds and universities across the country will travel to Germany and Poland, where they will study the causes and effects of genocide.