By Bri Brands
CLAS faculty members from several departments earned prestigious awards, distinctions, and opportunities from world-renowned professional organizations.
American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellows
Tina Tootle, professor and DEO in the Department of Biology and Joshua Weiner, associate dean for research and infrastructure in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, are among four University of Iowa faculty members named to the 2024 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general-scientific society.
The latest class of fellows features 471 new members and is comprised of distinguished scientists, engineers and innovators, recognized for their achievements across disciplines.
Tootle, a UI faculty member since 2009, has found that prostaglandins—molecules that help control pain, inflammation, heart health, and reproduction—and actin binding proteins, which form cells and allow them to move, can be linked to aggressive cancers and bad outcomes in cancer patients when found in high levels in the body. Additionally, prostaglandin works in such a way in flies that mirrors how the protein helps spread cancer in humans.
Weiner, a faculty member in the Department of Biology and associate director of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, focuses his research on how the brain develops. He has been studying a group of neural cell adhesion proteins called the clustered protocadherins. Over the last 21 years, he has sought to understand how the molecules work and interact during brain development in an effort to find treatment for various brain disorders.
American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
Kaveh Akbar, Jamel Brinkley, and Charles D'Ambrosio were among 17 recipients nationwide who received 2025 Awards in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honors society comprised of 300 members including, artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts.
Akbar, associate professor and director of the English and Creative Writing major, received $10,000 from the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for his New York Times bestseller list and debut novel, Martyr! The award is given annually for a work of fiction published during the preceding year.
Brinkley, assistant professor in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, received $20,000 from the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for his 2023 short story collection, Witness: Stories. The award is given annually to single out recent prose that merits recognition for the quality of its style.
D'Ambrosio, professor in the Iowa Writers' workshop, received $25,000 from the Award of the Merit Medal for the Short Story. The award rotates each year between painters, short story writers, sculptors, novelists, poets, and playwrights, and is a recognition of outstanding achievement in the genre. He is the author of two works of fiction and two collections of essays. Many of his stories originally appeared in The New Yorker.
National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders Forum
Two CLAS faculty members in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences have been invited to the National Academy of Medicine's (NAM) 2025 Emerging Leaders Forum in Washington, D.C., which will take place April 8-9, 2025.
Associate professors Michelle Voss and Jan Wessel were both nominated and selected to attend the forum, which includes interdisciplinary workshops and discussions designed to stimulate innovative solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing health and medicine.
Voss, who has been at Iowa since 2012, is a 2020 recipient of the Early Career Scholar of the Year Award and has published more than 100 pieces of work in scientific journals.
Wessel has been with the university since 2015 and holds a secondary appointment as an associate professor of neurology in the Carver College of Medicine. His research on cognitive control has been published more than 60 times.