University of Pittsburgh mathematician Anna Vainchtein has been awarded a five-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

The award will fund her work on materials with "shape memory" -- materials that can be bent but, when heated, will return to their original shape.

Curtis Meyer, a Carnegie Mellon University physicist, has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. He specializes in medium-energy physics and is designing a key instrument for GlueX, a major new experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va.

Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., has awarded Alan Meisel, a University of Pittsburgh professor of law and psychiatry, the Pellegrino Medal "for contributions to American health-care ethics and law." Meisel is an international authority on end-of-life decision making.

The Allegheny County Medical Society has named three fourth-year medical students as recipients of its Medical Student Award. They are Margaret Gibson of Aspinwall and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Sarah Kane of Smethport and the Drexel University School of Medicine; and Douglas Johnston of Philadelphia and the Temple University School of Medicine.

Joseph Constantino, a biostatistician at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and the primary statistician on several landmark studies of breast cancer treatments, is the winner of the school's 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award. Constantino recently was named director of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Projects' biostatistical center.