CLAS faculty members Rachel O’Neill, associate professor of molecular and cell biology, and Regina Barreca, professor of English, and engineering doctoral student Jackie Garofano have won state awards for their contributions to academia and society.
O’Neill was awarded a 2011 Women of Innovation award by the Connecticut Technology Council. The annual awards recognize women professionals and students who are innovators, role models, and leaders in the fields of technology, science, and engineering.
O’Neill’s research uses molecular genetic techniques, such as DNA sequencing, to study the inner workings of cells. She focuses on the centromere, which guides cells to replicate correctly, and the factors that affect its function. Her work has implications for causes of cancer, infertility, and birth defects.
Recently she and her colleagues discovered foreign DNA contamination in several widely used databases of animal genome sequences, suggesting that these databases could be problematic when used to identify disease. This work was featured in The New York Times.
Garofano received a 2011 Women of Innovation award in the Collegiate Innovation and Leadership category.
Garofano has developed several novel techniques for sampling materials samples that will contribute toward more reliable testing of materials used in turbine blades and coatings. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering part-time, while also working as education and outreach coordinator in the Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena at Yale.
She was nominated as a Woman of Innovation for her contributions to interdisciplinary research, applied to problems of practical engineering importance. Although at an early stage in her research career, she has already published four refereed papers as first author and two as co-author, with several further journal articles in preparation.
Barreca, professor of English, was awarded the annual Connecticut Woman in Leadership Award by the Women and Families Center of Middletown.
Barreca, a writer, humorist, and commentator on popular culture, is the author or editor of 22 books, including I Used to be Snow White But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Uses of Humor; A Sitdown With the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV’s Most Talked About Series; and Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coed Education.
Barreca blogs for the Chronicle of Higher Education and Psychology Today, and writes a regular opinion column in The Hartford Courant, where she spars with Larry Cohen. She is also a frequent speaker and writer of op-eds. She has appeared on NPR, the BBC, The Today Show, CNN, and Oprah to discuss gender, power, politics, and humor.
