Recipients are nominated by their departments and chosen by a committee of senior faculty, including past award recipients. Distinguished Scholars receive an honorarium and a research grant to be used over the next three years. The award is supported by the Office of Research. 

Claudia Turro, Dow Professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has received the Outstanding Alumni Award from her alma mater, Michigan State University. The award recognizes, among other accomplishments, Turro's "groundbreaking advances in the areas of inorganic chemistry, photochemistry and ultrafast spectroscopy, which has led to important discoveries with impact in medicinal chemistry and solar energy."

Chris Otter is an associate professor of history at Ohio State. He studies the history of technologies of many sizes and at many scales. Otter is a specialist in modern British history, with particular focus on the history of science, technology and public health, environmental history and the history of food.For the period of the 2020-2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, he will be working on his long-term research project on the history and concept of the technosphere, the sum total of all human technologies comprehended at multiple scales, from the tools and devices in our hands to our slowly warming atmosphere. “I am honestly very humbled to receive this award!” said Otter via email. “I will use it to continue research for a long-term book project on the history of the Earth's technosphere. The technosphere is the sum total of all human technological activity, from fire and the earliest stone tools to today's digital networks and warming atmosphere. Hopefully I will get a reasonable chunk of the book written as well.”

Tarunjit Butalia received a College of Engineering 2020 Award for Distinguished Outreach Achievements (for two decades of Coal Combustion Program) and the 2020 David C. McCarthy Engineering Teaching Award (for distingushed teaching across COE classes). 

Distinguished University Professor and Sustainability Institute Affiliated Faculty, Clark Larsen, anthropology was awarded the 2019 Cozzarelli Prize from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is an honor given to just six authors out of more than 3,300 submitted papers last year. The winners represent exceptional scientific achievement, originality and innovation in their fields.

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the induction of Katrina Cornish, horticulture and crop science and SI faculty advisory board, to its College of Fellows.Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer. The College of Fellows is comprised of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers.Dr. Cornish was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for “high-performance, natural allergy-safe latex for medical and consumer products, supporting developing countries.”

Bartow J. Elmore’s book "SEED MONEY: Monsanto's Past and the Future of Food" (W. W. Norton) has been selected for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, given annually to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern. These awards assist in closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires. Drawing on documents acquired via Freedom of Information Act requests, confidential files housed in corporate archives, sensitive interviews with company employees, courtroom testimony, and field research in Vietnam, Brazil, and beyond, "Seed Money" exposes how a company that once made Agent Orange and PCBs survived its complicated chemical past to seed our food future.   

The book, published with Cambridge University Press, is an anthology that is the first sustained examination of American involvement in World War II through an environmental lens, focusing on how the War remade American landscapes, institutions and environmental thinking and how wartime developments shaped the contours of postwar American environments and environmental thinking. The book contains a chapter by Kip Curtis, history, and also is co-edited by Peter Mansoor, history; Thomas Robertson, US Education Foundation, Nepal; and Richard P. Tucker, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Andrea Grottoli, professor of earth sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious 2020 – 2021 U.S. Fulbright Award to France. The research Grottoli will be conducting is in collaboration with the team of Jean-Pierre Gattuso at Sarbonne University’s Oceanographic Laboratory in Villfrance-Sur-Mer and will be a study on Mediterranean corals to determine how they are able to persist in stressful environments and how their survival can be enhanced through this century. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. 

The article was published Feb. 15, 2020, in Energy and Buildings. Clark’s research showed how total peak power demand in the country could be reduced by almost 10% with smart ventilation. Energy and Buildings is an international journal publishing articles presenting new research results and new proven practice aimed at reducing the energy needs of a building and improving indoor environment quality.