The winners of this year’s University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Awards, among the highest honors of literary achievement given to published authors at The University of Texas at Austin, were announced Wednesday, Oct. 22, at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Michael H. Granof, chairman of the University Co-operative Society, hosted the event and announced the winners. William Powers Jr., president of The University of Texas at Austin, presented the awards.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, professor emerita in the departments of Art and Art History and Middle Eastern Studies won the $10,000 grand prize for her book, “When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story,” published by University of Texas Press.
The University of Texas Press describes “When Writing Met Art” as a “pioneering investigation of the interface between writing and art [documenting] a key turning point in human history, when two of our most fundamental information media reciprocally multiplied their capacities to communicate. When writing met art, literate civilization was born.”
Four faculty members were awarded $3,000 runner-up prizes:
- Carlton K. Erickson, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, for “The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment,” published by W. W. Norton and Co.
- James N. Loehlin, Department of English, for “Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard,” published by Cambridge University Press.
- John T. Markert, Department of Physics, for “Physics for Engineers and Scientists, 3rd edition, extended,” published by W. W. Norton and Co.
- Kurt G. Weyland, Department of Government, for “Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sector Reform in Latin America,” published by Princeton University Press.
Ian W. Dalziel, of the Institute for Geophysics and Department of Geological Sciences, was awarded the $10,000 Career Research Excellence Award for maintaining a superior research program over many years at the university. Dalziel has dedicated most of his career to understanding global tectonic processes and to mapping out the geography of ancient times on Earth.
Andrea Gore and David Crews of the College of Pharmacy and Section of Integrative Biology, respectively, were awarded the $5,000 Best Research Paper Award for “Transgenerational Epigenetic Imprints on Mate Preference.”
Mr. Michael Smith, Department of Art and Art History, won the $3,000 Fine Arts Award for outstanding achievement.
The University Co-op Open Source Software Award was given for the first time. A team of faculty and staff from the university’s Applied Research Laboratories led by Brent Renfro won the $3,000 award for their platform-independent Global Positioning System (GPS) tool kit that provides a wide array of functions that solve processing problems associated with GPS.
