MSU College of Natural Science recognizes 2022 award winners
Nearly 100 individuals attended the Michigan State University College of Natural Science (NatSci) annual awards program on April 22 to acknowledge alumni, faculty and students for outstanding achievements and excellence. The event was held at MSU’s Wharton Center in the Jackson and Christman Lounges.
James D. Hoeschele (Ph.D., chemistry, ’69) received the 2022 Outstanding Alumni Award; Mark Evans Ondari (Ph.D., chemistry, ’10) received the 2022 Recent Alumni Award; and Edward F. Brown, MSU professor of physics and astronomy and FRIB, as well as interim chair of the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, received the 2022 Meritorious Faculty Award.
Hoeschele has been part of the MSU community as a doctoral student, a research fellow, an assistant professor, a collaborative researcher and a major donor. Upon completing his Ph.D. at MSU in 1969, he took a position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He returned to MSU in 1970 to work as a cancer research fellow in the lab of biophysics professor Barnett Rosenberg, who is credited with the discovery of the anti-cancer drug cisplatin. Between 1972 and 1994, Hoeschele held various positions—in industry, pharmaceuticals and academia—before he returned to MSU, where he taught general chemistry to non-majors and supervised undergraduate researchers. He retired from MSU in 2010. Hoeschele’s love of chemistry has saved countless lives and positively impacted hundreds of young minds through his teaching, mentoring and philanthropic support.
Ondari, currently Global Technology Guardian at Corteva Agriscience (formerly Dow AgroSciences/Dow-DuPont), is a Six Sigma Greenbelt. He was a three-time inductee into the CEO’s High Potential/Future Fellows, a talent incubation program for highly promising employees at the Dow Chemical Company. He holds more than twenty patents/patent applications from his research at the Dow and Corteva Agriscience. He served as a judge for the A.H. Nickless Innovation Award, which recognizes and engages aspiring STEM high school students in real-world industrial challenges. He has also volunteered at the Great Lakes Region Science Bowl Competition (2012); Science Olympiad (2010-2013); and the LEADership, Education and Development (LEAD) program through the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2012). He was a member of the board of directors (2012-2014) for the Midland Open-Door, a soup kitchen and shelter for the homeless.
Brown, a renowned researcher in the field of nuclear astrophysics, is one of the foremost experts regarding astronomical compact objects. His research exemplifies the interdisciplinary nature of nuclear astrophysics, and he collaborates extensively with both observational astronomers and nuclear physicists. He and his collaborators have made some of the first quantitative studies of how the interior structure of accreting neutron stars could be understood through observations of how they cool. It remains one of the few ways to reduce the timeline—from millennia to just years—when studying the structure of these objects. Brown has contributed to the open-source MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics) code, which has thousands of users worldwide in many subfields of astronomy. He received MSU’s 2013 Thomas H. Osgood Teaching Award, and the 2015 MSU College of Natural Science Teaching Prize. He has been involved in the overhaul of several physics and astronomy courses; the open-source textbooks he created for his astronomy courses have also been adopted by physics and astronomy departments at other universities.
In addition to these alumni and faculty awards, several NatSci graduate and undergraduate students were recognized for their outstanding contributions.
Daniel Puentes, physics; and Ana-Maria Raicu, cell and molecular biology, received Tracy A. Hammer Graduate Student Awards.
Four individuals received the Dan Bolin Undergraduate Student Award—Zainab Fayyaz, neuroscience (minor in Spanish); Kiinga Kioi, actuarial science (minor in entrepreneurship and innovation); Pelli Mechnikov, neuroscience (minor in Jewish studies); and Madeleine Russell, microbiology (minor in bioethics).
Banner image: Nearly 100 individuals attended the Michigan State University College of Natural Science annual awards program on April 22 to acknowledge alumni, faculty and students for outstanding achievements and excellence. The event was held at MSU’s Wharton Center in the Jackson and Christman Lounges.
