2021 GW OVPR Faculty Award Recipients
2021 Recipients
Distinguished Researcher Award
Ahmed Louri
David & Marilyn Karlgaard Endowed Chair Professor
Professor Ahmed Louri, a Fellow of the IEEE, is the David and Marilyn Karlgaard Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the George Washington University. For over 30 years, Professor Louri has done seminal work on the development of general frameworks for scalable, energy-efficient, high-performance, and reliable communications for parallel computing systems. In particular, he has accomplished fundamental and pioneering work in the critical areas of scalable and reliable multiprocessors and energy-efficient, fault-tolerant and high-performance network-on-chips for multicore and manycore architectures. His recent research work focuses on accelerator-rich reconfigurable heterogeneous architectures; machine learning techniques for efficient computing, memory, and interconnect systems, and future parallel computing models and architectures, including deep neural networks, and approximate computing.
Professor Louri has published more than 200 refereed journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers and is the co-inventor on several US and international patents. He is the recipient of IEEE Computer Society 2020 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, "for pioneering contributions to the solution of on-chip and off-chip communication problems for parallel computing and manycore architectures.”
He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, the flagship journal for the IEEE Computer Society, and also serves as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transaction on Sustainable Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.
Distinguished Scholar Award
Martha Finnemore
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Martha Finnemore’s research explores the social underpinnings of international politics and spans topics related to global governance, international organizations, internet politics, ethics, and social theory. Current research interests include the construction of norms and rules for cybersecurity and the role of aspiration as a transformative force in world politics. Her books have won top prizes from both the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association, and her articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Dr. Finnemore holds a BA from Harvard University, an MA from the University of Sydney, and a PhD from Stanford University.
Early Career Researcher Award
Dmitry Streletskiy
Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs
Dr. Streletskiy holds a Ph.D. in Climatology from University of Delaware and a M.S. in Geography from Moscow State University. His research is focused on understanding diverse impacts of climate change on ecosystems, population and overall sustainability of the Arctic regions. His research was published in Nature Communications, Environmental Research Letters, Remote Sensing, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Geophysical Research Letters, Polar Geography, Geographical Review and featured in major international climate assessments reports and major news outlets worldwide. Streletskiy is the Past President of the United States Permafrost Association and the Chair of Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost. He serves on editorial boards of Focus in Geography and Polar Geography. Dr. Streletskiy is Environment and Sustainability Science undergraduate advisor. He is teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in areas of geospatial techniques, physical geography, and climate change, with regional courses focused on the Arctic and Russia. He holds several grants funded by the NSF and Belmont Forum. Dr. Streletskiy spends most of the summers in the Arctic documenting evidence of rapidly changing climatic conditions on natural ecosystems, infrastructure and society.
Early Career Scholar Award
Celeste Arrington
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Dr. Arrington's research analyzes law and social change, comparative policy processes, social movements, and transnational advocacy, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. She is also interested in the security of Northeast Asia, human rights, and qualitative research methods. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell University Press). She has published articles in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Law & Policy, Asian Survey, and elsewhere. Her co-edited book (with Patricia Goedde), Rights Claiming in South Korea, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Arrington received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining GW, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on US-Japan Relations at Harvard University and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. More recently, she has been a fellow of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University and of the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Arrington is currently completing a book that analyzes the changing role of lawyers and litigation in Japanese and Korean policy regarding tobacco control and disability rights, which will be published in the Studies in Law and Society series at Cambridge University Press.
Research Mentorship Award
Christopher Cahill
Professor of Chemistry and International Affairs
Dr. Cahill has been at GW since July 2000 and has supervised some 13 PhD dissertations, several Masters theses, and numerous undergraduate and post-doctoral research projects in the area of f-element chemistry. The f-elements are those at the bottom of the periodic table, many of which are extremely rare, radioactive, or both. They find uses from magnets, to medical imaging, to nuclear energy and security. Dr. Cahill’s particular expertise, and that which he cultivates in his students, is X-ray crystallography- a technique that determines the molecular level arrangement of atoms in solids. Or, as he likes to say, “the name and address of every atom in there.” He has published approximately 140 peer-reviewed publications since beginning his independent career at GW, almost all of which include or were led by student authors. Dr. Cahill is the first physical scientist at GW to hold a joint appointment in the Elliott School of International Affairs, where he develops and delivers technical curricula targeting non-technical nuclear policy professionals. He is passionate about the interface between technical and non-technical communities and the challenges therein for creating technically savvy decision makers, as well as policy cognizant scientists. His education includes a BS in Geochemistry from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Fredonia, a PhD in Chemistry from SUNY-Stony Brook, and a post-doctoral appointment at Notre Dame. He is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award, a Bender Teaching Award, a Fulbright Scholarship and the Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching (2013). He is a past President of the American Crystallographic Association, a member of the Cosmos Club, and has held visiting researcher positions at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Argonne National Laboratory. More recently, he was the American Institute of Physics State Department Science Fellow, and is currently the Chair of the Chemistry Department.