When the 2013 Carnegie Science Awards are presented tonight inside the Carnegie Music Hall, roughly one in every four will go
to someone from UPMC and the Pitt Schools of the Health Sciences. They are:
- Nancy Minshew,
M.D., director of Pitt’s
National Institutes of Health Autism Center of Excellence, was selected as
the Catalyst Award winner. She also serves as a professor of psychiatry and
neurology at Pitt’s School of
Medicine.
- David Vorp, Ph.D.,
associate dean for research at Pitt’s Swanson School of
Engineering and on faculty at the Pitt/UPMC McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine,
was previously announced as the winner of the Life Sciences Award.
- Steven R. Little,
Ph.D., the chair of the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the
Swanson School of Engineering and, like Vorp, with the McGowan Institute, was
named the winner of the Post-Secondary Educator Award.
- And doctoral student Elaine Houston, from the School of Health and Rehabilitation
Sciences, was tabbed for the University/Post-Secondary Student Award. She
works on the Personal Mobility and Manipulation Appliance team under
her Rory Cooper, Ph.D., at the Human
Engineering Research Laboratories in Bakery Square.
Houston’s award was as much, if not more, for her
community involvement. She works in the First LEGO League coaching and
mentoring two teams of local 9- to 14-year-olds with disabilities and without,
among other projects that resonate with her.
Houston, a wheelchair user born with a variety of genetic
impairments, told the Inside Life Changing Medicine blog on Jan. 31 when the
Carnegie Science Awards were announced: “It’s been a lot of fun to play around
with the robots and with kids. What’s unique about the teams we have compared
to all the other teams in Pittsburgh [is that] we’re very focused on students
with disabilities. They might not be on a team anywhere else. This is a really
good chance to get kids with disabilities into the STEM [science, technology,
engineering and mathematics] fields and getting them excited. Just because they
have disabilities doesn’t mean they can’t be in STEM or do what they want to
do.”