Kent State Honors Three Faculty Members with 2011 Distinguished Scholar Awards, April 15

Beethoven specialist, accounting scholar and nuclear physicist to be honored

Three Kent State University faculty members will be recognized as Distinguished Scholar Award recipients at a luncheon ceremony on April 15. The recipients of the 2011 award are Dr. Theodore Albrecht from the School of Music, Dr. Ran Barniv from the Department of Accounting and Dr. Declan Keane from the Department of Physics. 

The awards luncheon, to be held at 11 a.m. in room 306 of the Kent Student Center, is part of the university’s annual Celebration of Scholarship event that also includes a student poster display and Faculty Recognition Program to be held in the Kent State University Library. Online registration at http://www.kent.edu/research/cos is required by April 11 to attend the free luncheon.      

About Theodore Albrecht

Albrecht, a Kent State faculty member since 1992, teaches musicology and music history and is best known as a Beethoven specialist. Albrecht is widely known for his work in Classical and Romantic music, the early 20th century and American music.

“Letters to Beethoven,” a three-volume collection of more than 500 documents, dozens never before available in any language, was written by Albrecht and published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1996.  For this work, he was given the 1997 Deems Taylor ASCAP award and Barry Cooper of BBC Music Magazine hailed it as “the largest and most important collection of Beethoven source materials to be published in English for many years.”

Recently, Albrecht has been offered a contract by the widely respected Indiana University Press for a book titled “Beethoven and the Orchestral Musicians of Vienna” to be published in late 2013.

Albrecht resides in Kent, Ohio.

About Ran Barniv

Barniv is globally recognized as one of the top accounting scholars and regularly presents his scientific work at primary international and national conferences. His research interests are in financial accounting and international accounting with a focus on regulation of corporations and capital markets and financial analyst performance. His scientific findings have an impact on academic research paradigms and indicate that regulations of crises and capital markets have some positive effects on accounting standard setters, corporations, financial analysts and investors.

Since joining Kent State in 1990, Barniv’s publication record is exceptional, focusing on quality rather than quantity. He published many articles, including 11 in the top 10 out of 350 accounting journals, seven in the last five years. He has published two articles on regulation and accounting effects in the top-rated accounting journal, The Accounting Review, which has a 90-95 percent annual rejection rate. 

Barniv lives in Stow, Ohio.

About Declan Keane

Keane, a physics faculty member at Kent State since 1988, is a prominent figure in experimental nuclear science.  Keane’s research group made worldwide headlines in 2010 after their discovery of the heaviest antimatter nucleus was published in the journal Science. This antinucleus was the first to contain a type of quark not found in ordinary nuclei or antinuclei, and the discovery opens a completely new region of the three‐dimensional generalization of the Periodic Table of elements. The published measurements have direct implications for ongoing searches for new phenomena in the cosmos.

The postdoctoral and graduate students in Keane’s group are stationed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York where the experiments are conducted as part of a large international collaboration at an accelerator measuring 2.4 miles in circumference, while Keane himself mostly works remotely from Kent. Previously, his research focus was on an earlier generation experiment at Brookhaven, and he served as spokesperson for the 55 physicists from 12 institutions that carried out this research.  

Keane is a resident of Kent.

About the 2011 Celebration of Scholarship

The events that comprise the annual celebration showcase research and creative activity and acknowledge, reward and support the culture of research and inquiry at Kent State. All of the events are free and open to the public. 

Other events for Celebration of Scholarship on April 15 include:

• From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., student posters, exhibits, demonstrations and performances from each college will be shown in the public areas of the Library.
• From 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., a Faculty Recognition Program Reception will be held on the first floor of the Library. Plated books will be on display, and commemorative booklets will be available. Kent State Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Robert G. Frank will recognize the faculty members who have received tenure and/or promotion in the last year. Family, friends and colleagues are encouraged to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

The 2011 Celebration of Scholarship is organized and sponsored by Kent State’s University Research Council, Division of Research and Sponsored Programs, University Libraries, and Division of Graduate Studies. More information is available at www.kent.edu/research/cos.

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Photo Note:
Photos of the 2011 Distinguished Scholar Award recipients are available upon request.

Media Contacts:
Jim Maxwell, jmaxwel2@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Emily Vincent, evincen2@kent.edu, 330-672-8595