The Department of Religious Studies and the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies received a $50,000 private gift to fund the Diane and Guilford Glazer Teaching Fellow in Modern Hebrew for 2009-2010. The scholar who was awarded the Fellowship is Dr. Marco Di GIulio, University of Florence, Italy.

The Department of Religious Studies and the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies are the recipients of the second Schusterman Visiting Israel Professor for 2009-2010. The funding was provided by a gift from the American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), the College of Arts and Sciences, and private donors from the Knoxville Jewish community for a total of $100,000. The position is held by Professor Igal Bursztyn, a film maker from Tel Aviv University.

The College of Law was recently featured in The Princeton Review’s 2010 edition of its book “The Best 172 Law Schools.”

Jim Thompson, professor of physics, and research assistant professor Yuri L. Zuev have won R&D Magazine’s “R&D 100 Award” in the Electrical Equipment category for their work on “Superconducting Wires by Expitaxial Growth on SSIFFS (Structural, Single-Crystal, Faceted, Fibers).” Along with their colleagues, Thompson and Zuev created and tested a kind of superconducting wire that makes electricity transfer more efficient.

Joseph Carcello, Ernst & Young Professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Management, was recently named as a member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) Investor Advisory Group. He is the only academic appointed to the board that helps establish auditing and professional practice standards for all public companies in the U.S.