Julia Kent, Council of Graduate Schools                                            

(202) 461-3874                                                          

jkent@cgs.nche.edu                

Beth Dempsey, ProQuest

(248) 349-7810

beth.dempsey@proquest.com

Awards recognize outstanding research by graduates in the fields of Political Science and Physics

Washington, DC – The Council of Graduate Schools / ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards, the nation’s most prestigious honors for doctoral dissertations, were presented to Joshua Kertzer and Matthew Reed at an awards ceremony during the Council’s 54th Annual Meeting. Both awardees completed their PhDs in 2013— Dr. Kertzer at The Ohio State University, in Political Science, and Dr. Reed at Yale University, in Physics.

Bestowed annually since 1982, the awards recognize recent doctoral recipients who have already made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields. ProQuest, an international leader in dissertation archiving, discovery and access, sponsors the awards and an independent committee from the Council of Graduate Schools selects the winners. Two awards are given each year, rotating among four general areas of scholarship. The winners receive a certificate, a $2,000 honorarium, and funds for travel to the awards ceremony.

“ProQuest has devoted decades to preserving and building paths to the discovery of dissertations because we believe they play a pivotal role in advancing knowledge,” said Niels Dam, ProQuest Vice-President, Dissertations Product Management. “The dissertations by Dr. Kertzer and Dr. Reed are excellent examples of the fresh perspectives that are explored and the new foundations set in graduate works. They make us proud to sponsor this important award.”​

“Once again, the Distinguished Dissertation Awards demonstrate how young scholars are having a dramatic impact on their fields,” said CGS President Suzanne T. Ortega. “It’s a testament to the vitality of graduate education when new knowledge contributed by recently minted PhDs can raise the level of understanding in their fields of study.”

The 2014 Award in the Social Sciences was presented to Dr. Kertzer for his dissertation, “Resolve in International Politics.” The project examines the concept of resolve, one of the most commonly used, but insufficiently understood, independent variables in International Relations. Arguing that resolve is “an interaction between situational stakes and dispositional traits,” Dr. Kertzer uses a range of different methods to “explain why certain types of actors are more sensitive to the costs of fighting, while others are more sensitive to the costs of backing down.” He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University.

[From left: Marlene Coles, ProQuest; Suzanne T. Ortega, CGS; Joshua Kertzer, winner, 2014 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award]

Dr. Reed received the 2014 Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Engineering for his dissertation, “Entanglement and Quantum Error Correction with Superconducting Qubits.”  His project “reports on work demonstrating the fundamental capabilities of a quantum computer using superconducting quantum bits.” The most significant result reported on his dissertation is “the first demonstration of quantum error correction in a solid-state device.” Understanding how to correct such errors is an important requirement for building a quantum computer. Dr. Reed is currently Research Scientist at HRL Laboratories.

[Matthew Reed, winner, 2014 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award]

More information about the CGS / ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award is available at www.proquest.com/go/scholars or at www.cgsnet.org.

Contacts:
Julia Kent, CGS
(202) 461-3874
jkent@cgs.nche.edu     

Tom Ewing, ETS     
(609) 683-2058
tewing@ets.org  

Washington, DC – The sixth annual ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education: From Admission through Completion was presented to Duke University during the 54th Annual Meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). The award is sponsored by CGS and Educational Testing Service (ETS). Dr. Paula McClain, Dean of The Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education, accepted the award on Duke’s behalf.

The award recognizes promising, innovative proposals to enhance student success and degree completion at the master’s or doctoral level while promoting inclusiveness. The winning institution is selected on the strength of its proposal to meet the award’s goals and to serve as a model for other schools. The winner receives a two-year, $20,000 matching grant.

Duke’s proposal will create Duke OPTIONS (Online Professional Development Tool for Individual OpportuNitieS), a tool that will help doctoral students explore a wide range of careers and create a professional development plan to acquire the skills, experience, credentials, and connections they need while they are in graduate school.

“Our students are telling us that in addition to their advisors, they need more sources of assistance in navigating career options,” Dr. McClain said. “At Duke, we provide many professional development opportunities, and this tool will help students create roadmaps for their career paths and goals and connect them to the right opportunities at the right time.”

[Paula McClain accepts on behalf of Duke University the 2014 ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education: From Admission through Completion]

The selection committee noted that Duke OPTIONS is worthy of recognition for the way it will empower students to set their own professional development agendas throughout their doctoral studies. Also, because prospective applicants will have access to Duke OPTIONS, the tool will gather data on how professional development opportunities can be used to achieve recruiting and admissions goals. Perhaps most exciting of all is the potential Duke OPTIONS has to reveal the effect of professional development on persistence and degree completion.  

Following the two-year funding period, Duke OPTIONS will be sustained as a permanent program thanks to commitments by the Duke administration and the Graduate School.

“The graduate education community benefits tremendously from the practices showcased by this award competition,” said CGS President Suzanne T. Ortega. “On behalf of our members, I thank Duke University for sharing their creative expertise with graduate institutions everywhere. And of course, I thank ETS, whose support makes possible this novel way to promote best practices among the graduate community.”

“Doctoral degrees are taking graduates to all corners of the workforce today,” said David G. Payne, Vice President and COO of ETS’s Higher Education Division. “As graduate schools redefine professional development to better reflect the broad range of careers PhDs are choosing, Duke’s project is well-poised to become a model for other institutions. We are especially excited to see the project’s focus on the full life-cycle of doctoral study, the transparency it adds for prospective applicants, and its potential to improve degree completion—especially among underrepresented minority students. ETS is delighted to support Duke in creating this innovative program for the benefit of doctoral students.”

Contact: 
Julia Kent
(202) 223-3791

Washington, DC – The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has awarded the 2014 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities to Dr. Michael Titelbaum, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The awards ceremony was held during the CGS 54th Annual Meeting.

The Arlt Award is given annually to a young scholar-teacher who has written a book deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the humanities. Dr. Titelbaum becomes the award’s 44th recipient for his book, Quitting Certainties (Oxford University Press, 2013). He received his PhD in Philosophy from University of California-Berkeley in 2008.

Dr. Titelbaum’s book presents a new approach for tackling a fundamental problem of epistemology. As a philosopher carefully rationalizes what s/he knows, it becomes necessary to accept that things can be ‘known’ with varying degrees of certainty. And over time, as new evidence is discovered and considered, the philosopher can update the degree of certainty with which they know what they know. The current standard theory of how individuals should change their degrees of belief over time (Subjective Bayesianism) has a few holes: it can’t account for situations where individuals have forgotten information; or in which the degree of certainty was based on self-locating claims. In the book, Titelbaum introduces his Certainty-Loss Framework as a way to reinterpret Bayesian methodology and alter the theory’s updating rules.

[From left: Suzanne T. Ortega, CGS President; Michael Titelbaum, winner, 2014 Arlt Award; John McCarthy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School at University of Massachusetts Amherst and member of the 2014 Arlt Award Selection Committee.]

Quitting Certainties was selected to receive the Arlt Award based on the impact the book has seen since its publication. Nominators praised Titelbaum for the way his Certainty-Loss Framework is making possible a deeper examination of commitment, consistency, and the nature of information.   

Created in 1971, the Arlt Award honors the first president of CGS. The winner must have earned a doctorate within the past seven years from, and currently be teaching at, a North American university. Nominations are made by CGS member institutions and are reviewed by a panel of scholars in the field of competition, which rotates annually among seven disciplines within the humanities. This year’s field was Linguistics and Philosophy. The winner receives a $1,000 honorarium, a certificate, and travel to the awards ceremony.

Attendees of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) 2014 Annual Meeting were repeatedly exhorted to press for more legislative support for graduate institutions. Speakers issued a call to action for greater advocacy as state-by-state divestment in higher education shows little sign of reversing.

Science magazine spoke with University of California System President Janet Napolitano following her presentation at the 2014 CGS Annual Meeting to delve deeper into how graduate leaders can make the case for graduate schools in an environment of declining state support and competing federal funding priorities.

Janet Napolitano, University of California System President, and other speakers at the Council of Graduate Schools 54th Annual Meeting provided a call-to-action for greater advocacy of graduate education issues.

Following her presentation at the CGS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, December 4, University of California System President Janet Napolitano was heading to Capitol Hill to advocate for the importance of graduate education. More administrators need to do the same, she said, imploring those in attendance to move beyond the comfort of the “echo chamber” and the “coalition of the willing" to a wider audience of policy makers and the general public.

Enrollment growth at U.S. graduate schools is increasingly coming from India, the Wall Street Journal reports. International students now make up 17 percent of all U.S. graduate students, according to data from the 2014 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey, Phase III: Final Offers of Admission and Enrollment.

CGS President Suzanne Ortega speaks with Inside Higher Ed about the diversification of graduate enrollments playing out through international admissions trends in 2014.

For the first time since the council's reports began, in 2004, first-time graduate enrollment by Chinese students in graduate programs at American universities has dropped from the level the year before.