Annual awards shine a light on exceptional staff and faculty

The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences recently bestowed eight faculty and five staff members with awards in recognition of their excellence and contributions to USC Dornsife and the university.

The Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Faculty Award honors outstanding scholarship, teaching and service to the community. The Outstanding Staff Achievement Awards recognize those who go above and beyond in their role at the College.

“Our strength at USC Dornsife comes from people like these faculty and staff, who drive our understanding of the world, develop new and bold ideas, act as dedicated mentors and teachers, and serve as role models for colleagues and students,” said USC Dornsife Interim Dean Moh El-Naggar at the award ceremony on Nov. 12.

Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Senior Faculty

Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History

Gruner has made enormous contributions to the understanding of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and other instances of mass genocide. His most recent book, Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany, was nominated for the Jewish Book Award. A forthcoming work, “Mass Violence in Jewish Homes during Kristallnacht,” promises to shed new light on a pivotal historical event.

He is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC Dornsife, which supports short and long-term research fellowships, hosts large conferences, and features a robust schedule of year-around events. Gruner is also a “beloved teacher and mentor,” according to his nomination. His undergraduate classes fill up quickly and he has advised more honors theses than any other history faculty member in the past 15 years.

Jeffrey Russell, Professor of Philosophy

Russell’s research is “remarkable both for its brilliance and for the range of topics it covers,” reports his nomination.

His 25 peer-reviewed articles have all appeared in highly selective journals and his writing has been selected an outstanding three times for the Philosopher’s Annual, which picks the top 10 philosophy articles published each year. In 2022, he won the Global Priorities Research Prize from the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.

Since 2023, Russell has served as the department’s director of graduate studies. He has advised a number of prominent PhD students and is currently on six dissertation committees. His teaching evaluations are consistently excellent, notes his nomination.

Alan Watts, Professor of Biological Sciences, Physiology and Biophysics

Watts is a “template of excellence in all facets of academia,” says his nomination.

He has conducted seminal research in understanding the neural systems that control metabolism and body weight regulation. His discoveries are central to the leading diabetes and weight loss pharmaceuticals used today. Watts’ research program has received funding from the National Institutes of Health for 33 years, and he has taken on leadership positions in the top scientific societies of his field.

Watts has served on more than 40 committees at USC, often as department chair, and is a devoted mentor to both junior faculty and students. His “General Biology: Cell Biology and Physiology” (BISC 220) class is considered a challenging “weeder” course for students wishing to pursue medicine but nonetheless receives high praise from those who enroll. He is widely considered the “senior statesmen of the department,” according to his nomination.

Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty

Brittany Friedman, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Friedman has produced original and essential research on the subjects of race and ethnicity, law and society, inequality and punishment, notes her nomination.

The quality and significance of her work is reflected in three major grants, each totaling between $1 million and $1.5 million. One grant established the Captive Money Lab, of which she is co-founder, examining the impact of “pay-to-stay” fees. Her second book, Carceral Apartheid: White Supremacist Alliances & the Rise of the Black Guerilla Family, will be published in 2025.

Friedman has reinvigorated the teaching of race and ethnicity in the sociology department, revising the graduate seminar in the sociology of race and adding new undergraduate courses. She is also a dedicated advisor and mentor, funding two of her PhD students as research students in her lab.

Jonathan Libgober, Assistant Professor of Economics

Since his arrival at USC in 2019, Libgober has served on numerous committees and been instrumental in key recruiting efforts for the economics department. He is also a dedicated advisor, writing countless letters of recommendation for students.

Libgober’s teaching evaluations are consistently excellent and his class sizes are large, a testament to students’ eagerness to learn from him. He brought course designs over from his time as a PhD student at Harvard, which means USC Dornsife students are now exposed to one of the most advanced microeconomics classes in the world.

His research focuses on microeconomics, in particular the economics of information. He has published peer-reviewed papers in three highly regarded journals, with more soon to come. His productivity, and the quality of his research, reflects his stature as an emerging leader in the field of economic theory, says his nomination.

Santiago Morales, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics

Morales’ research focuses primarily on children’s capacity for self-regulation, work that holds great potential for intervention and prevention efforts, says his nomination.

In the short time since completing his PhD in 2017, he has been a highly productive and novel scholar, producing 65 peer-reviewed journal articles and five book chapters. He has received nationwide recognition for his work, including the prestigious Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association.

Morales teaches popular classes to undergraduates and mentors graduate and postdoctoral fellows. “He is on dissertation committees in almost every area of the department, because he is universally seen as a superb mentor,” notes his nomination. He also serves on the department’s steering committee and is active in efforts to boost diversity, equity and inclusion.

Cris Negron, Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Negron, whose scholarship focus on understanding symmetry, is a highly visible scholar who regularly gives talks worldwide. He also has an impressive degree of grant support. He’s received a National Science Foundation Career Award and is a lead principal investigator on a Simons Collaboration in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences.

His work has appeared in top journals and is making considerable advances in the field, notes his nomination. In a paper recently accepted by the prestigious Journal of the European Mathematical Society, he resolved the major “Logarithmic Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture” that was first proposed by physicists in 2006.

Within the department, he has served on the graduate committee and the algebra qualifying exam committee, and he is the lead organizer of an algebra seminar. He is also active in bringing in new faculty.

Jessica (Xiaomin) Zu, Assistant Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Culture

Zu is a superb and original scholar of modern Chinese Buddhism, says her nomination. She has so far published three peer-reviewed articles in top publications, has been invited to give several international talks and is at work on a promising monograph titled “Darwin, Dharma and Democracy.”

Much of her early career work was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, making her achievements even more hard-earned, notes her nomination.

Since arriving at USC in 2020, she has developed and taught four new courses on Chinese religions and modern Buddhism, for which she’s achieved superb class evaluations. She helps to recruit faculty, trains graduate students and is among the first members of the USC Asian Pacific Islander Faculty and Staff Association, working on curriculum design.

Outstanding Staff Awards

Amber Arias, USC Equity Research Institute

Arias is responsible for all financial transactions for the 30-member USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute team, including travel arrangement and reimbursements. Over the past year, Arias has also played a crucial role in last-minute rescheduling and logistics for not one, but two off-site events due to extreme weather events.

“In an already high-performing team, Amber stands out for her willingness to go beyond to make us successful,” says her nomination.

Amy Braden, Associate Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI), Director of Programs for the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World and USC Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future programs

Braden has been “central to EMSI’s success,” notes her nomination. She provides unflagging support and assistance to doctoral and postdoctoral fellows, faculty and visiting scholars. EMSI has hosted more than 2,000 scholarly presentations since its founding, with Braden assisting with nearly all of them.

Recently, she played a central role in the successful National Endowment for the Humanities grant related to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which will bring scholars to USC in celebration of the event.

Susan Harris, Executive Director of the USC Dornsife Joint Educational Project

Harris has been with JEP in various capacities for 30 years, demonstrating her deep commitment to and impact on one of USC’s signature programs.

She has co-directed JEP’s Peace Project, which teaches students social and emotional skills, and the USC Hong Kong Polytechnic University Service-Learning Exchange Program.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped JEP pivot to providing tutoring to frontline caretakers.

“Susan embodies the values of inclusivity, kindness, and equity in all her interactions,” says her nomination.

Hannah Kiszla, experiential learning coordinator at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability

Since Kiszla’s recent arrival at USC, she has proven herself an exceptional addition to the USC Wrigley Institute team, says her nomination.

One of her first assignments was evaluating and then overseeing the new Catalina Residential College Maymester program, which has since become a “crown jewel” of institute programming.

Kiszla has also transformed the institute’s service-learning offerings and taken the initiative to build new partnerships and collaborations.

The nomination notes that they “struck gold” when they hired Kiszla.

Susan Vaswani, Mathematics Graduate Programs Manager

Since joining the department in 2022, Vaswani has instituted more efficient PhD tracking systems and produced a well-read newsletter, and she plays an active role in recruiting students. She has also filled in as the department’s office manager for extended periods. She has since taken over some of these tasks permanently, in addition to her regular workload.

“It would not be an exaggeration to say Susan has been single handedly keeping our department afloat during these times, while still moving at top speed,” notes her nomination. “I simply do not know how she does it all,” her nominee wrote.