Laurels

NEW ADVISORSAppointed to the board of advisors to Tisch College are VIKRAM AKULA, A90, chair of VAYA Financial Services in Hyderabad, India, and MARIA CRISTINA GONZALEZ NOGUERA, J97P, a New York City–based consultant. JEFFREY GEWIRTZ, A91, executive vice president and chief legal officer for the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, has been named an advisor to athletics. SAM HO, M76, executive vice president and chief medical officer of UnitedHealthCare, has joined the board of advisors to the School of Medicine. PETER WITTICH, E83, president of Interstate Asphalt in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is a new advisor to the School of Engineering.

NEW SCHOOL DEANSRICHARD ARUM, A85, chair of the Department of Sociology at NYU, will become dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, on June 30. UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman described Arum as “one of the country’s leading experts on public school improvement and an important voice in improving the quality of undergraduate education.” He has published influential research on the effectiveness of college education in preparing students for adulthood. MICHELLE A. WILLIAMS, G86, a distinguished epidemiologist and award-winning educator known for her studies of maternal and child health around the world, will become dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in July. Since 2011, she has been the Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and chair of epidemiology at the school. Williams received her master’s degree in civil engineering from Tufts.

WRITING PRIZESEAN B. CARROLL, L83, an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist who uses genetics and the tools of molecular biology to reveal how new animal forms have evolved, is the recipient of the 2016 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science from Rockefeller University. An award-winning writer, educator, and film producer, Carroll has won acclaim for making complex biological concepts exciting to a broad audience. His latest book, The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, about the rules regulating life in the natural world, was published in March. He is vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he created a science filmmaking initiative, and has been the host or executive producer of more than a dozen films.

HUMBOLDT AWARDPAUL G. PICKOWICZ, G68, a historian at the University of California, San Diego, has received a 2016 Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany. A specialist in the social and cultural history of twentieth-century China, Pickowicz will work with prominent scholars based at the Institute of Sinology at the University of Heidelberg. Candidates for the award are recommended by a group of leading international scholars, including fifty Nobel laureates.