First the federal government declared Nathan Kuppermann a “national hero” for his groundbreaking research to improve the care of acutely ill children.

Ten days later, Kuppermann received the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s Excellence in Research Award.

Kuppermann is a professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics in the Department of Emergency medicine, where he holds the Bo Tomas Brofeldt Endowed Chair and serves as department chair.

His National Heroes Award came from Emergency Medical Services for Children, a program of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency recognized Kuppermann as the principal investigator of a major study that established and validated a prediction rule for traumatic brain injuries in children with blunt head trauma. By using the prediction rule, physicians can forego unnecessary CT scans and the associated risks of radiation exposure.

The study by Kuppermann and his colleagues in the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network, or PECARN, appeared in The Lancet in 2009.

The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s Excellence in Research Award recognizes a member’s contributions to emergency medicine over the course of an entire career.

Besides helping to develop the prediction rule for traumatic brain injuries, Kuppermann has focused on the epidemiology of infectious emergencies in children, and pediatric diabetic ketoacidosis and the risk of cerebral edema.

Kuppermann is a former chair of the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Collaborative Research Committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and was the founding chair and remains a principal investigator of the PECARN network, the first federally-funded pediatric emergency research network in the country.

Kuppermann oversees the PECARN research node that comprises UC Davis and the Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Salt Lake City children’s hospitals.

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Phoebe Ayers, a librarian in the Physical Sciences and Engineering Library, has been appointed to a two-year term on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Ayers has been a volunteer editor of Wikipedia since 2003 and is a co-author of the 2008 book, How Wikipedia Works, and How You Can Be a Part of It.

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The American Telemedicine Association recently presented awards to Associate Vice Chancellor Thomas Nesbitt and Professor James Marcin, and appointed Professor Peter Yellowlees to the association’s board of directors.

Nesbitt, associate vice chancellor for Strategic Technologies and Alliances for the UC Davis Health System, received the Leadership Award for the Advancement of Telemedicine. Marcin, professor of pediatric critical care medicine and director of the UC Davis Health System Pediatric Telemedicine Program, received the association’s Special Interest Group and Chapter Achievement Award.

Yellowlees is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine and one of the world’s leading experts on the use of telemedicine and psychiatry.

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Subsequent to his appointment to the American Telemedicine Association board of directors, Professor Yellowlees received a seat on the Cal eConnect board.

Cal eConnect, announced in March by Gov. Schwarzenegger and his health and human services secretary, Kim Belshe, is charged with ensuring that health care in California is built on a solid foundation of information and data technologies that provide safe and secure patient and provider access to health information, and thereby dramatically improve the quality of care for all Californians.

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Plant sciences professor Douglas Shaw, a small fruit geneticist, is the recipient of this year’s Wilder Silver Medal from the American Pomological Society, in recognition of his outstanding service to horticulture.

Shaw’s research on the quantitative genetics and breeding of strawberry has had a huge impact on the strawberry industry — California’s in particular. Some 60 percent of the world's strawberry fruit is produced using one of the 12 cultivars that Shaw and his team have released.

California is the dominant producer of both fresh and processed strawberries, providing more than 87 percent of the strawberries consumed in North American. UC strawberry cultivars are characterized by broad environmental adaptation, excellent fruit quality, high yields, high harvest efficiency and good disease resistance.

The American Pomological Society is the oldest fruit organization in North America, founded in 1848 by Marshall P. Wilder to foster the science and practice of fruit growing and variety development.