UPMC, Pitt Doctors Receive Carnegie Science Awards

By Chuck Finder and Tim Betler

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.”