Did you know this about USC faculty?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Southern California
1

<p>Distinguished Professor George Olah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and also awarded the Priestly Medal, the highest honor awarded by the American Chemical Society.</p>

<p>Distinguished Professor Morten Lauridsen, one of the most influential living composers, was awarded the National Medal of Arts.</p>

<p>University Professor Kevin Starr was awarded the National Humanities Medal.</p>

<p>Philip Stephens is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the U K's national academy of science which was founded in 1660.</p>

<p>University Professor Michael Waterman is a founder in the field of computational biology. He is co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping.</p>

<p>Distinguished Professor Leonard Adleman is a Turing Award laureate.</p>

<p>Richard Bucy is known for the Bucy-Kalman filter, a mathematical technique for optimization, fundamental for modern control theory.</p>

<p>Irving Reed is noted for the Reed-Solomon Codes, which are used to correct errors in compact disks, DVDs and cellular telephones.</p>

<p>University Professor Solmon Golomb is a member of the National Academy of Scince and the National Academy of Engineering.</p>

<p>Dean of the School of Gerontology, James Birren, won the Sandoz Award, gerontology's highest prize along with University Professor Caleb Finch.</p>

<p>USC has four winners of the Shannon Award Golomb, Reed, Viterbi and Welch-tied with MIT.</p>

<p>University Professor Warren Bennis was hailed by Forbes as the "dean of leadership gurus."</p>

<p>Business Week noted Professor Edward Lawler as one of the top six gurus in the field of management.</p>

<p>Pierre Koenig was honored with the Maybeck Award for lifetime achievement in design.</p>

<p>University Profesor Geoffrey Cowan is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.</p>

<p>University Professor Manuel Castells is a leading urban theorist and is a founder of the New Urban Sociology.</p>

<p>Annenberg School professor Elihu Katz won the Israel Prize for Social Sciences.</p>

<p>Midori, chairman of the strings department in Thornton, was named a Messenger of Peace by the U.N.</p>

<p>Elyn Sacks and Luis Alfaro both received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.</p>

<p>University Professor Stephen Toulmin was chosen as Jefferson Lecturer for intellectual achievement in the humanities.</p>

<p>Distinguished Professor T Boyle won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Prix Passion and two O Henry Awards.</p>

<p>Tomlinson Holman of CSA is the inventor of THX sound system. He won the Sam Warner Medal and the Eastman Kodak Gold Medal as well as the World Technology Award for Information Technology.</p>

<p>Mark Harris of CSA has won three Oscars.</p>

<p>Tony Maxworthy won the Taylor Medal in Fluid Mechanics.</p>

<p>Provost Max Nilias was awrded the IEEE Simon Ramo Medal.</p>

<p>Professor Thomas Jordan is the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.</p>

<p>Microbiologist Michael Ming-Chiao Lai is vice president of the Academia Sinica.</p>

<p>Professor Antonio Damasio is director of the Brain and Creativity Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.</p>

<p>Professor Velina Houston has received two Rockefeller Foundation Playwriting Fellowships.</p>

<p>Professor Steven Lamy founded the Teaching International Relations Program and has served as a consultant to the U.S. Dept. of Defense and the U.S. Dept. of Education.</p>

<p>Maja Mataric, Professor of computer science, received the National Science Foundation Career Award. She is a founding director of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems.</p>

<p>Professor B. Khoshnevis of Viterbi recently invented an innovative robotic contour home building process.</p>

<p>Stephen Cronin and Hossein Hashemi of Viterbi have won Faculty Early Career Awards from the National Science Foundation.</p>

<p>Andrea Armani of Viterbi has won the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.</p>

<p>Shang-Hua-Teng, also from Viterbi, has won the NSFoundation Career Award and the 2008 Godel Prize.</p>

<p>Azad Madni, of Viterbi, will be the co-director of the SAE Program. He is a fellow of IEEE and is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.</p>

<p>Professor Alice Parker is the recipient of the 2009 American Society of Engineering Education Sharon Keillor Award.</p>

<p>Professor Terence Langdon received the Honorary Medal from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It is the Academy's highest award.</p>

<p>Professor Alan Willner has won the 2009 Bookham Prize from the Optical Society of America.</p>

<p>Research Associate Professor in Computer Science, Paul Debevec, is the winner of an Elan "Visionary" Award for exceptional achievements in computer graphics.</p>

<p>Professors Mark Hurnayun and Dana Goldman were recently named to the Institute of Medicine.</p>

<p>and many more...</p>

2

<p>Marshall Professor Paul Frommer created the language spoken by the Na’vi in Avatar.</p>

<p>School of Theatre Adjunct Professor Jason Robert Brown is a Tony-Award winning Broadway writer. He has written many works, including The Last Five Years, Songs for a New World, 13, and the score for Parade.</p>

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<p>Wisdom
Thank you. I only have a few of the brochures which list faculty honors.<br>
GG</p>

4

<p>haha those aren’t from brochures, they’re just things I know. I’ve seen the Frommer thing all over the Internet in stuff about Avatar, and as a complete theatre dork, I was beyond psyched when I found out that Jason Robert Brown directs and teaches at USC. :slight_smile: He’s like the Sondheim of our generation, pretty much!</p>

5

<p>Georgia Girl, USC should seriously hire you to be one of their freshmen recruiters…;)</p>

6

<p>wisdomsomehow - I’d like to point out that Sondheim is the Sondheim of our generation. JRB doesn’t come close.</p>

7

<p>Thank you Georgia Girl! </p>

<p>The many accomplishments of the faculty are impressive. And I am sure these are just the tip of the iceberg! </p>

<p>I agree that you should be a recruiter for USC!</p>

8

<p>Fairly recently: Mathematics Professor Eric Friedman was elected president of the American Mathematical Society.</p>

9

<p>musicalstudent: haha true, but he hasn’t composed so much recently. I just meant that he’s a pretty prolific composer who’s done a variety of celebrated works (though 13 has received mixed reviews. I don’t know much about it), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he keeps writing and becomes more famous.</p>

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<p>Reggie Bush, highest paid amateur football player.</p>

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<p>I think Reggie Bush is just an alum, not faculty?</p>

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<p>Correction to post #8. It’s Prof. Eric FRIEDLANDER.</p>

13

<p>I think an important addition to who is on the faculty at USC is the active role my son has experienced from these people and the “friends” of the school in his first year. He is a music major and auditioned with and then has had in his classes Lamont Dozier who is an artist in Residence at the Thornton School of Music and has dozens of top ten hits primarily Motown many of which you are extremely likely to have heard. He is in a writing for musical theatre class this semester with Jason Robert Brown who is mentioned earlier in the thread and he loves it. He got to perform before the Steve Miller Band this fall and go to an after party where he knows John Fogarty was also present (I don’t know who was there he didn’t know). He has a class every Friday where music industry people come in and discuss the music industry. This list in itself is impressive. His performance final last semester was at a site where Michael Jackson was rehearshing for his most recent tour. His vocal instructor has written a book on voice instruction. His drumming instructor has written multiple books on drumming, was a member of Weather Report, Maynard Ferguson, and a few others and has signature drumsticks (like a Mickey Mantle bat). And this is what I know. He is a 19 year old boy, and while a little better than my others, parental communication isn’t his number one priority. Probably a lot more he doesn’t communicate or maybe entirely appreciate the uniqueness of what he is being exposed to. LA is the center of the entertainment industry, so these may be exceptional examples relative to USC overall, but we have been impressed with the level of high quality interaction. And… this is only the famous folks who while they bring great exposure and experience, aren’t necessarily more valuable than many of the other outstanding faculty he has been exposed to. USC has delivered well beyond what they represented to incoming music students in terms of quality of faculty, industry connections, etc.</p>

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<p>wisdomsomehow - hahahha I understood the comparison, I was just being an *******. =)</p>

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<p>Radad,
What an enriched experience your son is having at SC! If you can find it Madbean posted a somewhat similar post about her son’s unique journey of discovery in SCA. </p>

<p>I hope someday you would post that on the Music Major site as it is very northeastern oriented, in my opinion.</p>

<p>Thank you for sharing with us.</p>

16

<p>Sondheim isn’t of our generation, not at all. He’s, in my opinion, the greatest living musical theatre talent, but he isn’t of our generation.</p>

<p>It’s really a stretch to even say JRB is of OUR generation, but I’ll let it slide as our generation has yet to reveal it’s talented musical theatre composers.</p>

17

<p>I’m a new Ryan Scott Oliver fan, too, but he’s not as produced, I don’t think, which makes sense from a commercial standpoint, but makes me sad from an artistic one. </p>

<p>Not so much that JRB is OF our generation, but he composes FOR our generation… although we’re kind of in the middle of 13 and Songs for a New World/The Last Five Years, but whatever. I was just trying to get the point across to people who aren’t as ridiculously obsessed with MT as we are, but I’m sure you knew that. :)</p>

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<p>Sondheim may not be a member of our generation, but he’s still writing (Bounce/Road Show) and his work is now more relevant than ever. One could make the case that our generation is the last one to call him ours.</p>

<p>When did CC turn into BWW?</p>

19

<p>I’ve heard some not-great things about BWW, I try and stay away from that one.</p>

<p>As far as I know, though, Sondheim isn’t teaching at USC. :slight_smile: And Jason Robert Brown is (sometimes). And he directs a few shows there, I believe. Which is pretty cool. And more or less relevant to the topic at hand. :)</p>

<p>ps I like Kerrigan & Lowdermilk too. But that’s off-topic. Oops!</p>

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<p>Haha, I’ve never frequented BWW, but I have been known to peruse the musicals.net message boards. There are some real…characters on there, to say the least.</p>