Editor’s note: The information for this story includes excerpts from the citations written from materials provided by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Office of Research, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs and the University Press.
Thirty faculty members are being recognized Monday at the Rackham Building for their teaching, scholarship, service and creative activities.
Distinguished University Professorships recognize full or associate professors for exceptional scholarly or creative achievement, national and international reputation, and superior teaching skills. Created in 1947, each professorship bears a name determined by the appointive professor in consultation with her or his dean. Each professorship also carries an annual salary supplement of $5,000 and an annual research supplement of $5,000. The duration of the appointment is unlimited, and the title — without the salary and research supplements — may be retained after retirement. In addition, newly appointed Distinguished University Professors are expected to deliver an inaugural lecture during the first year of appointment. Recipients are:
• Joel Blum, Jerry Keeler Distinguished University Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, John D. MacArthur Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, professor of earth and environmental sciences and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, LSA.
• Stephen Forrest, Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Engineering, Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and professor of materials science and engineering, College of Engineering; and professor of physics, LSA.
• Sharon C. Glotzer, John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering, Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, professor of chemical engineering, professor of materials science and engineering and professor of macromolecular science and engineering, CoE; and professor of physics, LSA.
• Tiya Miles, Mary Henrietta Graham Distinguished University Professor of African American Women’s History, professor of Afroamerican and African studies, professor of American culture, professor of history and professor of women’s studies, LSA.
• Mark Newman, Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics, professor of physics and professor of complex systems, LSA.
• Dr. Gilbert Omenn, Harold T. Shapiro Distinguished University Professor of Medicine, professor of computational medicine and bioinformatics, professor of internal medicine, professor of human genetics, Medical School; and professor of public health, School of Public Health.
• Dr. Peter Polverini, Jonathan Taft Distinguished University Professor of Dentistry and professor of dentistry, School of Dentistry; and professor of pathology, Medical School.
• Ronald Suny, William H. Sewall, Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History, professor of history and professor of political science, LSA.
• Sarah Thomason, Bernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and professor of linguistics, LSA.
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Awards honor senior faculty who consistently have demonstrated outstanding achievements in the areas of scholarly research or creative endeavors, teaching and mentoring of students and junior faculty, service, and a variety of other activities. Up to five awards of $1,500 are made each year. Awardees are:
• Jeffrey Fessler, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, professor of biomedical engineering, CoE; and professor of radiology, Medical School.
• Elaine Gazda, professor of classical art and archaeology, LSA; and curator, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.
• Charlotte Mistretta, William R. Mann Professor of Dentistry, School of Dentistry.
• Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz, professor of psychology and neuroscience, and chair, Department of Psychology, LSA.
• Sidonie Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, professor of English language and literature, professor of women’s studies, LSA; and director, Institute for the Humanities.
The Distinguished Faculty Governance Award was established by the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs in 1986 and is funded by the Alumni Association. The criterion for the award is distinguished service to faculty governance over several years with an emphasis on university wide service. A $1,500 stipend is presented. Awardee:
• Karen Staller, associate professor of social work, School of Social Work.
Faculty Recognition Awards are intended for faculty early in their careers who have demonstrated substantive contributions to the university through achievements in scholarly research or creative endeavors; excellence as a teacher, adviser and mentor; and distinguished participation in service activities of the university. Eligible candidates include full professors with no more than four years at that rank, associate professors and assistant professors. Up to five awards of $1,000 each are made each year. Recipients are:
• Marlyse Baptista, professor of linguistics, and professor of Afroamerican and African studies, LSA.
• Jason Flinn, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, CoE.
• Bhramar Mukherjee, professor of biostatistics and associate chair, Department of Biostatistics, and professor of epidemiology, SPH.
• Jeremy D. Semrau, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, professor of civil and environmental engineering, CoE; professor of environment, LSA; and professor of natural resources and environment, School of Natural Resources and Environment.
• Haoxing Xu, associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, LSA.
Research Faculty Recognition Awards honor individuals who hold at least a 75-percent appointment at the rank of research associate professor, research assistant professor, associate research scientist or assistant research scientist. Selection criteria include exceptional scholarly achievements, as evidenced by publications or other scholarly activities in any academic field of study. There is a $1,000 stipend. Awardees are:
• Brian M. Hicks, research assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, Medical School; and adjunct assistant professor of psychology, LSA.
• Megan E. Patrick, research assistant professor, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research.
Research Faculty Achievement Awards honor individuals who hold at least a 75-percent appointment at the rank of research associate professor, research assistant professor, associate research scientist or assistant research scientist. Selection criteria include exceptional scholarly achievements, as evidenced by publications or other scholarly activities in any academic field of study. There is a $1,500 stipend. Awardee:
• Judith Sebolt-Leopold, research associate professor, Department of Radiology, and Department of Pharmacology, Medical School.
The Collegiate Research Professorship Award honors exceptional scholarly achievement and impact on advancing knowledge in science, engineering, health, education, the arts, the humanities or other academic field of study. The recipient is presented $2,000. Awardee:
• Ananda Sen, Lee A. Green Collegiate Research Professor, Department of Family Medicine, Medical School; and research professor, Department of Biostatistics, SPH.
Regents’ Awards for Distinguished Public Service recognize public service activities that relate closely to teaching and research and reflect professional and academic expertise. There is a $1,000 stipend. Awardees are:
• Dr. Matthew Davis, professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases, professor of internal medicine, Medical School; professor of public policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy; and professor of health management and policy, SPH.
• Ashley Lucas, associate professor of theatre and drama, School of Music, Theatre & Dance; associate professor of Residential College, LSA; and associate professor of art and design, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design.
University of Michigan Press Book Awards are presented to members of the university teaching and research staff, including emeritus members, whose books have added the greatest distinction to the Press List. Selections are made from books published within a span of two calendar years. The stipend is $1,500, to be split by two awardees:
• Katherine Crosby, doctoral student, Department of History, University of South Carolina; Bachelor of Arts, University of Michigan.
• Andrei Markovits, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, professor of Germanic languages and literature, professor of political science and professor of sociology, LSA.
University Librarian Achievement Awards are presented for exceptional distinction reflected in active and innovative career achievements in library, archival or curatorial services. The recipient will receive a $1,500 stipend. Awardee:
• Jane Blumenthal, associate university librarian and director, A. Alfred Taubman Health Sciences Library, University Library.
University Librarian Recognition Awards honor an individual who holds a primary faculty appointment as librarian, archivist or curator with no more than eight years’ practice in the profession. Selection criteria include active and innovative early-career achievements in library, archival or curatorial services. This may include developing specialized services for faculty and students, improving access to information or efficiently managing library and archival resources, or other activities. The recipient is presented $1,000. Awardee:
• Marci Brandenburg, senior associate librarian, A. Alfred Taubman Health Sciences Library, University Library.
Distinguished University Professorship
Earth and environmental scientist Joel Blum is renowned for his research on the cycling of nutrients and toxic trace elements in the environment. He developed methods to follow elements through complex biogeochemical cycles using small variations in their isotopic compositions. This has led to new insights into how humans have transformed ecosystems.
He helped pinpoint the Yucatan Peninsula location where an asteroid struck 65 million years ago, wiping out half of all living species, and was among the first to apply methods developed to study meteorites to ecological questions. He has contributed to the understanding of how acid rain affects forest nutrient cycles, the patterns of long-range songbird migration, and the interplay between mountain building and climate change. Most recently, Blum demonstrated that different isotopes of mercury react at different rates during important biogeochemical reactions, opening the way to ascertain the sources, toxicity and reaction history of mercury in the environment.
As camp director of the Camp Davis Field Station in Wyoming, he doubled course offerings, increased student enrollment fourfold, and raised funds for and supervised major facilities improvements. He has served as department chair and a member of the LSA Executive Committee, Biological Station Executive Committee, and Provost’s Office Tenure Review Panel.
Blum is an inaugural editor of the open access journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Geological Society of America, and Geochemical Society, which awarded him its Clair C. Patterson Medal. Among other honors, he received a Presidential Faculty Fellow Award from the National Science Foundation and the White House, the Meteoritical Society Nininger Meteorite Award, and Case Western Reserve and University of Alaska alumni achievement awards.
Distinguished University Professorship
Academic entrepreneur and U-M alumnus Stephen Forrest has altered daily life through his inventions. He also has demonstrated research’s economic impact. Under his leadership as vice president for research from 2006-13, the university’s annual research budget grew from $750 million to $1.3 billion. During that period U-M launched the Energy Institute and the Mobility Transformation Center and purchased the North Campus Research Complex.
After earning his master’s and doctoral degrees in physics at U-M, Forrest worked at Bell Laboratories, the University of Southern California, and Princeton University. There, he directed Princeton’s Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials and chaired the electrical engineering department. Princeton in 2012 created the Stephen R. Forrest Endowed Faculty Chair in Electrical Engineering.
Forrest discovered fundamental reasons photo detectors for long-distance fiber-optic networks were performing poorly and invented improved detectors used today in all fiber-optic communications systems and in high-resolution telescopes and night-vision cameras. He also introduced new methods for growing organic thin films. He holds 277 United States patents, has published 565 papers in journals, and has presented 670 talks at conferences and international meetings.
Forrest has helped found five companies and collaborated on National Research Council studies. He chairs the University Musical Society board and serves on the Ann Arbor SPARK and Applied Materials boards and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology board of governors. Of his 53 doctoral graduates and 28 postdoctoral fellows, 18 are professors at major universities and several others are leaders in industry.
A fellow of the American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Inventors, Forrest received the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Daniel E. Noble Prize and the Society for Information Display Jan Rajchman Prize. Forrest was selected U-M’s Distinguished University Innovator in 2015.
Distinguished University Professorship
Computational scientist Sharon Glotzer is internationally known for her simulations of soft matter, including glass-forming liquids and nanoscale building blocks that self-assemble. At the National Institute of Standards and Technology she co-founded and directed its Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science before joining the CoE faculty in 2001.
Among notable findings, Glotzer invented the idea of “patchy particles,” a conceptual approach to nanoparticle design. She showed that entropy can assemble shapes into many structures, which has implications for materials science, thermodynamics, mathematics and nanotechnology.
Glotzer publishes extensively, with more than 200 journal articles. She is an associate editor of the American Chemical Society’s highly ranked ACS Nano, and serves on editorial boards of other major scientific journals. She has advised the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense and Department of Energy on numerous issues. She led an international study on materials simulation and co-led several related reports that contributed to the White House Materials Genome Initiative.
Glotzer has created popular courses on computational nanoscience, assembly engineering, and soft matter, and has mentored 20 postdoctoral fellows, 41 doctoral students, six master’s students and 35 undergraduate students. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Among other accolades, she has received the Materials Research Society Medal and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Charles M.A. Stine Award. She is a Simons Investigator and a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow. University honors include the Monroe-Brown Foundation Research Excellence Award from CoE and a Faculty Recognition Award.
Distinguished University Professorship
Historian Tiya Miles is renowned for her brilliant scholarship, including her paradigm-changing examination of relationships between African and Cherokee people in early America, which has implications for issues of power, gender, race and culture in the past and today. Miles, winner of a 2011 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, joined U-M in 2002, and has directed Native American studies and chaired the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies.
In her “Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom” (2005), Miles addresses power relations among Cherokee slave owners, their black female slaves, and mixed-race offspring before and after the Trail of Tears, when Cherokee and other South Atlantic tribe members were forced to migrate west. “Ties” won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize, and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Ten Most Influential Books Prize.
Her second book, “The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story” (2010), won the National Council on Public History Book Prize, Georgia Historical Society Book Prize and American Society for Ethnohistory Book Prize. She also wrote “The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens & Ghosts” (2015) and “Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era” (2015), and edits the Cambridge University Press Studies in North American Indian History Series.
Miles’ students recently uncovered details about slavery in early Detroit and presented findings to the Historical Society of Michigan. She founded and directs ECO Girls, to foster environmental awareness among teenage girls in southeast Michigan. Miles has received accolades including an Outstanding Teaching Award from U-M’s Panhellenic Association and Interfraternity Council and a Faculty Cornerstone Award.
Distinguished University Professorship
Among the first to recognize the importance of network structure for understanding the behavior of complex systems, theoretical physicist Mark Newman helped launch the field of modern network theory in the 1990s. Today one of the most vibrant research areas in the physical and social sciences, network theory is creating new ways to understand phenomena from the spread of human disease and Internet viruses to interactions on social networks.
Newman uses mathematical modeling, analysis and computer simulation to enhance our understanding of networked systems. In a 2008 Nature article, he showed how to detect hierarchical structures in a variety of networks, identify network data errors, predict missing links, and generate artificial networks. His research group has investigated email and friendship networks, epidemiological contact networks and animal social networks.
The author of more than 150 scientific publications, he has written seven books, including “The Atlas of the Real World” (2008) about cartography, which won the Geographic Association’s Gold Prize. His work has been featured on National Public Radio and the Discovery Channel, and in periodicals including The Washington Post, Scientific American and Esquire. Newman has introduced important innovations in the physics curriculum, including two new combined graduate and undergraduate complex-systems courses that attract and prepare large numbers of students to use networks and complex systems in graduate level research.
Newman, a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a senior fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, has received accolades including the 2014 Lagrange Prize and, from U-M, the Harold C. Earley Faculty Research Award, Robert D. and Janet E. Neary Research Award, Faculty Recognition Award, and LSA Excellence in Education Award.
Distinguished University Professorship
Physician-geneticist Dr. Gilbert Omenn is renowned for his path-breaking contributions to medicine and the advancement of science. Omenn, U-M’s first executive vice president for medical affairs and chief executive officer of the U-M Health System, has led major public health studies, championed the role of university medical centers, and played key roles in national health policy.
At the University of Washington, where he was a Howard Hughes Investigator and dean of public health and community medicine from 1982-97, he led the landmark Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial, finding that beta-carotene and vitamin A, surprisingly, increased lung cancers and cardiovascular disease. As a medical student, he identified an autosomal recessive primary immunodeficiency disorder, subsequently named the Omenn syndrome.
Omenn transformed U-M’s Medical Center into an integrated, financially stable academic health system. He launched the Biological Sciences Scholars Program to recruit outstanding faculty, laid the groundwork for several major capital projects, including the Samuel and Jean Frankel Cardiovascular Center, and promoted diversity and civic engagement. The A. Alfred Taubman Biomedical Sciences Research Building atrium bears his name and portrait.
Omenn’s influence is evident in his 542 journal articles and many professional contributions. He heads the international Human Proteome Project, mapping the human proteome, and has served on numerous National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory boards. A past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Association of American Physicians, and National Academy of Medicine and its Council.
He received the John Gardner Legacy of Leadership Award from the White House Fellows Association, the David E. Rogers Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges, and was elected to the U-M Medical School League of Research Excellence and League of Educational Excellence.
Distinguished University Professorship
Internationally recognized dentist, scientist and educator Dr. Peter Polverini was among the first to identify the role of tumor suppressor genes in controlling tumor neovascularization and cancer progression, and pioneered the concept of transplanting blood vessel-forming cells to create networks of functional blood vessels. He brought the same rigor to the School of Dentistry, where, as dean from 2003-13, he promoted evidence-based dentistry and transformed the school’s curriculum.
Early in his career, Polverini used an innovative mouse model to demonstrate the role of the survival factor BcL-2 in tumor neovascularization and progression, and the role of growth factors and cell signaling networks. He currently focuses on health policy, collaborative care and personalized health care. He has published more than 150 articles, textbooks and book chapters, has given more than 100 scientific presentations, and holds five patents.
Polverini has trained and mentored 20 undergraduates, six doctoral students, and 12 postdoctoral fellows, many now scientists. He also designed a popular course for undergraduates exploring clinical education options. As dean he championed leadership development, community and global outreach, and biomedically integrated dental education. A diplomat of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Polverini is past president of the American Association of Dental Research and former chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Section on Oral Health and Dentistry. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology and a member of the Institute of Medicine.
His honors include the International Association for Dental Research Distinguished Scientist Award in Oral Medicine and Pathology, the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine Birnberg Award, and the American Dental Education Association William J. Gies Award for Vision.
Distinguished University Professorship
Historian Ronald Suny, a leading scholar of Imperial Russian and Soviet history, the Caucasus, and the Armenian genocide, is renowned for his path-breaking contributions to the history and theory of nationalism, ethnicity and empire.
Suny’s “The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution” (1972) was the first book to recount the revolution’s impact outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. A series of conferences he coordinated on the social history of modern Russia led to a number of books, including “A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin” (2001). His “The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States” (1997, 2011) is the leading textbook on Soviet history and is accompanied by two other books he wrote.
Suny also wrote “Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History” (1993) and “The Making of the Georgian Nation” (1988, 1994). His “The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union” (1993) is a classic in nationalism studies. His latest book, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide” (2015), offers a rigorous account of the 1915 tragedy.
Suny has worked with more than 60 doctoral students. He redesigned U-M’s core survey of Russian area studies and launched a new introductory course, A History of the Present. He is a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and former chair of the Society for Armenian Studies.
He received the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award for Distinguished Contributions and the Middle East and North African Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Award, among other honors.
Distinguished University Professorship
Linguist Sarah Thomason, a prominent authority on language contact — the study of what happens to languages when speakers of different languages interact — is well known for her scholarship, her endeavors to document and preserve endangered languages, and leadership and service at U-M and beyond.
Thomason has enhanced understanding of historical and comparative linguistics, pidgins and creoles, and Native American linguistics. She asserts that language history is best studied within its social context in her co-authored book “Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics” (1988, 1991) and addresses language mixture in her textbook “Language Contact: An Introduction” (2001). In “Endangered Languages: An Introduction” (2015), she outlines causes of language endangerment, methods of documenting endangered languages, and ways to revitalize them.
Thomason has worked part of each summer since 1981 with elders of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation on a dictionary and language resource to preserve the Salish-Pend d’Oreille (Montana Salish) language of northwestern Montana. She recently published an online Salish-English/English-Salish dictionary. She supports students working on endangered languages and organized an undergraduate linguistics conference as well as the 2012 Marshall M. Weinberg Symposium on bilingualism.
Thomason has served as department chair and as a member of U-M’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Committee. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a past president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and of the Linguistic Society of America, and former editor of Language, its journal.
Her honors include the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award and the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association’s Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal.
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award
Jeffrey Fessler, a leading authority on image reconstruction, has revolutionized the theory and practice of medical imaging with his group’s groundbreaking mathematical models and algorithms that significantly improve safety and image quality.
As increased use of X-ray computed tomography (CT) has raised concerns about lifetime medical radiation exposure, Fessler worked with GE on the first commercial image reconstruction method for positron emission tomography in the late 1990s. He also collaborated with other U-M scientists on an algorithm for single-photon emission computed tomography that has benefited thousands of cardiac patients. His group is working to reduce image reconstruction time to help make low-dose CT scans a viable screening tool for lung cancer and to reduce scan time in magnetic resonance imaging.
Fessler holds eight U.S. patents and is author or co-author of 155 journal papers, 219 conference papers, 225 conference abstracts, and four book chapters. A champion of open research, he was among the first to provide his software and data sets online, enabling others to replicate his group’s findings. He has been recognized with the Department of Biomedical Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the CoE Education Excellence Award, the Rackham Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, and was named Eta Kappa Nu Teacher of the Year.
Fessler has served in leadership roles including associate chair of his department’s electrical and computer engineering division and a Rackham Executive Board member. Nationally, he has chaired Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers committees and served as associate editor of top journals in the field. He is a fellow of the IEEE and received its Edward J. Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award.
At U-M, he has been recognized with his department’s Outstanding Achievement Award, the Rackham Faculty Recognition Award, the David E. Liddle Research Excellence Award, and the Henry Russel Award.
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award
Renowned Roman art scholar Elaine Gazda has changed the face of classical archaeology and ancient art history with her path-breaking scholarship, mentoring and leadership at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, and the American Academy in Rome.
Gazda directed the Kelsey Museum from 1986-97. It became accredited and she introduced initiatives including an outreach department and volunteer docent program. Early in her career, Gazda spearheaded a re-evaluation of Roman copies of famous Greek statues to better understand the history of Roman art. The subject has become one of the field’s most important developments.
She has done archaeological fieldwork in Italy and Turkey and has written, co-authored or edited 14 books and exhibition catalogues. They include “Building a New Rome: The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch” (2011). She has chaired or co-chaired 24 dissertation committees, and her graduates hold positions at major universities and museums. She also has played a prominent role in the American Academy in Rome, teaching and as a trustee from 1994-2011.
The American Academy honored her with its Trustees’ Medal in 2011 and as an invited resident in 2014. She serves on the Archaeological Institute of America and American Art Museum Directors ad hoc joint task force, and was elected to the German Archaeological Institute in 2009. She has received the John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities and an LSA Excellence in Research Award.
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award
A pioneering researcher in sensory neurobiology and development of taste, Charlotte Mistretta is known for the elegance and thoroughness of her research, which has important ramifications for how taste sensation is regulated. She was a leader in showing that the mammalian sense of taste functions before birth and changes postnatally.
Mistretta developed the first organ culture system of an embryonic tongue, which is widely used to determine factors that regulate taste development. Her studies of signaling pathways that control maintenance of taste buds enhance understanding of pathway-altering drugs’ effects on patients’ sense of taste.
Mistretta has presented her findings in 88 journal articles and book chapters and at numerous conferences. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health have supported her research since 1973. As the School of Dentistry’s associate dean for research and research training from 2005-14, Mistretta promoted initiatives on postdoctoral advising and graduate student training. She directed the Oral Health Sciences Ph.D. Program from its inception in 1993 to 2010, and co-directed U-M’s Hearing and Chemical Senses Training Program.
A member of the MCubed University Research Funding Initiative executive committee, she has served on U-M’s Budget Priorities Committee, the Provost’s Faculty Advisory Committee, and President’s Task Force on the Organization of the University.
She helped found and was the first chairperson of the Association of Chemoreception Sciences and serves on its federal liaisons committee. She is a member of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Advisory Council and participates on NIH and NSF advisory panels and review committees.
Her accolades include an NIH Research Career Development Award, NIDCD Claude Pepper Award, AChemS Salt Taste Award and Kerry-Manheimer Award from the Monell Chemical Senses Center.
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award
Working in the forefront of cognitive neuroscience, Patricia Reuter-Lorenz has enhanced understanding of basic mental processes. Renowned for her investigations of cognition and aging, she has opened new vistas on mental and neurological changes as people grow older.
She chairs the Department of Psychology, is a faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research Survey Research Center, and co-directs the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course.
Reuter-Lorenz was among the first to use functional brain imaging to investigate associations between brain alterations and declines in cognitive processes related to aging. She has advanced understanding of the function of specific brain regions, and has shown that functions served by regions in one half of the brain may be subsumed partially by regions in the other half as people age, opening up possibilities to enhance the aging mind.
Reuter-Lorenz has published 96 articles, 19 book chapters, has given more than 165 invited lectures and conference presentations, and has co-edited two books. She received U-M’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program Outstanding Mentor Award and the American Psychological Association Division 20 Mentor Award.
She is a member of the First Generation University Student Support Group at the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. Nationally, she is a co-founder and governing board member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and serves on the Association for Advancement of Aging Research National Scientific Advisory Council and the Psychonomic Society governing board.
She is co-editor-in-chief of Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition and serves on numerous editorial boards. A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, she received the Justine and Yves Sergent Award for International Accomplishments in Cognitive Neuroscience, Michigan’s LSA Excellence in Research Award, the Rackham Career Development Award, and Faculty Recognition Award.
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award
In a robust interdisciplinary career spanning four decades, Sidonie Smith pioneered the field of life writing and has helped shape others, including women’s studies, feminist theory, literature and human rights and graduate education. Director of the Institute for the Humanities since 2012, she has energized the humanities at U-M and beyond.
Her books, models of feminist scholarship, include: “Where I’m Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography” (1974), “A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation” (1987), “Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century” (1993), and “Moving Lives: Women’s Twentieth Century Travel Narratives” (2001).
She co-authored the acclaimed “Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives” (2001, 2010) and edited a special issue of Biography on “Personal Narrative and Political Discourse” (2010). She has published 70 articles, authored or co-authored eight books, and co-edited eight others. She serves on 11 editorial boards and has given numerous keynotes and named lectures.
Renowned for her creative teaching and mentoring, Smith has served on 40 dissertation committees and directed 11 others. She draws on her experience and past leadership roles, including as president of the Modern Language Association and chair of women’s studies and English at Michigan, to address urgent questions about the future of graduate education in her forthcoming book, “A Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in ‘Good Enough’ Times” (2015).
She has taught 37 different courses at U-M, from introductions to the humanities and women’s studies to graduate courses in feminism and human rights. Additionally, she founded Digital Currents, a hub for exploration of digitally environed humanities scholarship and pedagogy at U-M. She has been awarded seven fellowships, including a Fulbright and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.
Research Faculty Recognition Award
Psychologist Brian Hicks is renowned for his groundbreaking research on genetic, environmental, and developmental influences on substance abuse, antisocial behavior, and psychopathic personality disorder. He is an expert on understanding the onset and persistence of impulse control problems related to violating norms for appropriate behavior and the rights of others. His research is important due to personal suffering and negative consequences for family members, victims of crime and society associated with externalizing disorders.
Hicks conducted a series of quantitative genetic analyses that showed a highly heritable general propensity to disinhibition accounted for the parent-to-child transmission of externalizing disorders, among other findings. He also identified and created a measure to assess behaviors present prior to the initiation of substance use that were most predictive of later substance abuse problems. He has begun work on a neurobiological model of how individuals overcome addictions. Hicks also has completed several studies on psychopaths, and how they are able to wreak havoc while appearing well adjusted.
Hicks’ research is highly cited and has had a major impact in the field. He has published 65 journal articles, co-authored four book chapters and received the Fulker Award for most meritorious paper published in Behavior Genetics in 2011. He is a consulting editor for several journals, reviews grants for the NIH, and has been awarded multiple grants funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Hicks is active in U-M’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and the Undergraduate Lab and Seminar in the Advanced Laboratory in Psychopathology. Hicks has received early career contribution awards from the Behavior Genetics Association, the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy, and the Society for Research in Psychopathology.
Research Faculty Recognition Award
Megan Patrick, an international expert studying alcohol and drug use and alcohol-related risky sexual behaviors among adolescents and college students, focuses on topics of urgent public health importance in the fields of developmental psychology, alcohol research and prevention science.
As the principal investigator on seven NIH grants and co-investigator on several others, including U-M’s Monitoring the Future study, she examines the prevalence, predictors and outcomes related to substance use. She has examined events such as spring break and 21st birthdays to identify individuals whose drinking places them at risk for injuries, alcohol poisoning and victimization. She has discovered that drinking more alcohol on a given day is more likely to be paired with sex among students not in a relationship and those who believe that alcohol facilitates sex.
Patrick proposed and validated new guidelines to define extreme binge drinking, and has studied risk behaviors in South Africa, alcohol use and heavy drinking in the United Kingdom, and alcohol and energy drink use among U.S. college students. She has evaluated programs to curb weekend drinking, pioneered Web-based interventions for high-risk drinking, and is investigating the feasibility of integrating Web-based surveys into a nationwide study.
She has published 70 articles in leading journals and 14 book chapters, monographs and other publications and is a reviewer for academic journals. Patrick mentors in the SRC Summer Internship Program and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. She regularly guest lectures in the psychology and epidemiology departments and has served on the Institute for Social Research’s Information Technology Review Committee and the Survey Research Center’s Situational Review Committee.
Among other honors, she received the UROP Outstanding Research Mentor Award and the Pennsylvania State University College of Health and Human Development Emerging Professional Alumni Award.
Faculty Recognition Award
Marlyse Baptista, one of the world’s top creolists and a leading expert in her native Cape Verdean Creole, pursues foundational questions regarding the origins and processes that govern language emergence and change. She is renowned for the originality of her research, linking language contact, formal grammatical theories, language documentation, and the histories of founding populations in African colonies involved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Her current research examines the joint contributions of European and African source languages to creole genesis.
Baptista has conducted extensive fieldwork on Cape Verdean Creole, spoken in Cape Verde, formerly a 15th century Portuguese colony. Her findings appeared in “The Syntax of Cape Verdean Creole: The Sotavento Varieties” (2003), nominated for the Gustav O. Arlt Award in the Humanities.
She collaborates with U-M faculty to model cognitive processes involved in creole genesis and with Stanford University geneticists to identify the ethnic origins of the creators of Cape Verdean Creole. She co-founded the Cape Verdean Creole Institute and advocates for language planning and the use of local creole languages in public school curricula.
Baptista has created eight linguistics courses at U-M, co-directed Michigan’s theme semester “Language: The Human Quintessence,” and has taught at four Linguistic Society of America Summer Linguistic Institutes. She has served on the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies executive board, as a Rackham Faculty Ally for Diversity since 2010, and as a member of the Provost’s Committee on Diversity.
Nationally, she is past president of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. She co-chairs the Linguistic Society of America Program Committee and previously chaired its Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics. Baptista has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. A fellow at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities, she has received a Michigan Humanities Fellowship and MCubed support for her innovative, interdisciplinary work.
Faculty Recognition Award
An innovator in the field of computer software systems and energy software management, Jason Flinn has improved computer reliability, security, performance and functionality through his path-breaking research. The first to show how software could trade quality of service for energy efficiency, he also was among the earliest to consider offloading computation from mobile devices to servers. His book “Cyber Foraging: Bridging Mobile and Cloud Computing” (2012) was the first on the topic.
A CoE faculty member since 2002, Flinn directs U-M’s Software Systems Laboratory. He has solved long-standing problems in computer storage systems. For decades it was believed that such storage systems could be fast or safe but not both. He overturned conventional wisdom by applying a technique called speculative execution to achieve good performance and strong consistency in distributed storage systems. Currently, he is working on ways to allow demanding applications to run on devices with limited storage and battery. He has disseminated his research through 58 conference papers and journal articles, and invited talks and seminars.
Flinn receives high student evaluations and is an excellent mentor. He has advised two master’s and 11 doctoral students, including some who work at Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. He is chair of the computer science and engineering graduate admissions committee and he has served on many other committees. Nationally, he has led major conferences, including the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. He also has served as associate editor of ACM Transactions on Storage and on the editorial board of Mobile Computing and Communications Review.
His accolades include eight conference best paper awards, the CoE Education Excellence Award, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Outstanding Achievement Award, and NSF CAREER Award.
Faculty Recognition Award
Biostatistician Bhramar Mukherjee is renowned for her cutting-edge research involving Bayesian analysis of epidemiologic data and contributions at the interface of genetics and environmental epidemiology, including advances in the genetic epidemiology of colorectal and other gastrointestinal cancers. She has developed prospective ordinal outcome models under retrospective sampling settings and was among the first to report the risk of pancreatic cancer in Lynch syndrome patients and non-melanoma cancers in tumor protein p53 mutation carriers.
Recently named the Department of Biostatistics’ first associate chair, she co-directs the environmental statistics core at U-M’s new Lifestage Environmental Exposures and Disease Center and co-directs the newly launched Global Statistics Core in the Office of Global Public Health.
Mukherjee has published 138 articles in leading statistics, epidemiology and medical journals, and has given more than 100 presentations. Winner of the SPH Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012, she is a member of the school’s Committee on Global Public Health and has co-chaired its Diversity Committee.
She is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and also was elected to the International Statistical Institute and appointed to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Review Committee. She has served on the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society executive committee and as secretary-treasurer of the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies. She is associate editor of Biometrics and was the 2013 Joint Statistical Meetings program chair.
Her accolades include U-M’s Elizabeth C. Crosby Research Award, John G. Searle Assistant Professorship, Gilbert Whittaker Fund for the Improvement of Teaching Grant, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching awards, and a National Security Agency Young Investigator Grant. She also received the Purdue University School of Science Outstanding Alumna Award and International India Statistical Association Young Researcher Award.
Faculty Recognition Award
Environmental scientist and engineer Jeremy D. Semrau is an international expert in methanotrophy, microbes that use methane as a source of carbon and energy. Additionally, he has significantly advanced sustainability at U-M with his teaching and service, including foundational contributions to the Graham Sustainability Institute and a new undergraduate minor in sustainability.
His research interests include the genetics, biochemistry and molecular ecology of methanotrophs, with an eye to developing novel applications of these microbes. He has isolated and characterized a wide range of methanotrophs, enhancing understanding and ability to apply these microbes, particularly for the control of methane emissions, creation of biofuels, and for the production of novel metal-binding compounds with significant medical uses. He holds three U.S. patents, has published many articles in high-impact journals, and has given scores of invited talks.
Semrau launched U-M’s Student Sustainability Initiative and has expanded interdisciplinary undergraduate education through his environmental and sustainability courses. He has chaired or co-chaired 10 doctorate committees and directed 13 master’s and eight undergraduate student projects.
As the Graham Fellow for Research Development, Semrau oversaw the Graham Institute’s initial programming, recruited external advisory board members and institute partners, and created graduate fellowships to attract and retain top students. He designed the cross-campus sustainability minor while serving as associate director of the Program in the Environment.
Semrau has received the College of Engineering Monroe-Brown Service Excellence Award and Vulcans Excellence in Teaching Award; American Society of Civil Engineering, Michigan Student Chapter-Professor of the Year Award; Civil and Environmental Engineering Departmental Award for Excellence in Teaching; and the national civil engineering honor society’s James M. Robbins Award for Excellence in Teaching. The University of Texas at Austin has presented him with an Outstanding Young Alumnus/Alumna Award.
Faculty Recognition Award
Cellular and molecular biologist Haoxing Xu pioneered the modern analysis of ion channels in lysosomes, which are vital for cell function. One of the top lysosome researchers in the world, his studies are transforming understanding of cellular membranes, how animal cells regulate their vital functions, and diseases caused when these functions go awry.
He was the first to directly demonstrate the importance of ion channels to lysosome function, and also showed that defects in ion channel signaling can cause a group of rare inherited metabolic disorders known as lysosomal storage diseases, characterized by the accumulation of undigested or partially digested macromolecules which cause cells to die. Xu also has identified chemicals that potentially could regulate lysosome functions and lead to drugs to treat lysosomal-derived diseases.
He has shared his discoveries in 71 invited talks, 52 journal articles, and three book chapters. Xu has introduced new courses, including his popular Molecular Biology of Pain and Sensation, and is known for his engaging multi-media lectures. He has mentored numerous undergraduates in his laboratory and leads monthly meetings of ion channel and neurobiology researchers from across campus.
He serves on U-M’s President’s Advisory Panel on Biosciences, on the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience Steering Committee and on his department’s graduate admissions and executive committees. He is an editorial board member of Scientific Reports and Pfugers Archiv-European Journal of Physiology. Xu recently was executive editor of the Cell Calcium Special Issue: Organellar Channels and Transporters.
In 2015, he co-founded the prestigious Gordon Research Conference on Organellar Channels and Transporters. His honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He has been recognized as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and is a member of U-M’s Biological Sciences Scholars Program. He also received the university’s Henry Russel Award.
Research Faculty Achievement Award
Judith Sebolt-Leopold, renowned for her contributions to protein kinase biology and drug discovery, has worked at the forefront of translational medicine for several decades, in the pharmaceutical industry and more recently in academia. Her pioneering research on therapeutic inhibition of protein kinases has significantly advanced the treatment of certain cancers.
She co-directs U-M’s Comprehensive Cancer Center Experimental Therapeutics Program and is a member of the North Campus Research Center Translational Oncology Program. Previously, she worked at Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research/Warner-Lambert Co. and Pfizer Global Research & Development. She was named Pfizer Global R&D Michigan Manager of the Year in 2003.
Her outstanding accomplishments include the discovery and development of the first MEK inhibitor clinical candidates. Her team was the first to take a small molecule MEK inhibitor from initial concept to the clinic to treat patients with solid tumors. Her current research is directed toward the development of experimental systems in which biospecimens from patients with colorectal and pancreatic cancers are implanted within hours of surgery into mice to determine the most effective treatment for that individual patient. She also is developing of a new class of kinase inhibitor to selectively impair dual key signaling pathways in cancer cells.
Sebolt-Leopold serves on the Cancer Research editorial board and the National Institutes of Health Developmental Therapeutics Study Section. She has published nine book chapters and 75 articles, and has presented her work at nearly 60 conferences, symposia and meetings. She works tirelessly to champion and nurture the careers of those around her.
She has served on numerous committees of the American Association for Cancer Research, including her current tenure on the Women in Cancer Research Council. At U-M, she serves on the Cancer Research Committee and the executive steering committee of the Center for the Discovery of New Medicines.
Collegiate Research Professorship Award
Internationally recognized biostatistician Ananda Sen is an expert in reliability and survival analysis with a focus in the areas of recurrent events and competing risks. His statistical acumen and ability to clearly communicate complex statistical concepts have fueled scores of U-M collaborations, leading to advances in cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, women’s health and preventive medicine. He has been elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a member of the International Statistical Institute.
His publication record as a statistician includes more than 125 articles in peer-reviewed journals and invited book chapters. His models and statistical tools analyzing recurrent event data are used in manufacturing, software development and medical studies. Sen has extensive collaborative experience in cancer prevention and biomarker research with diet and disease endpoints.
He directs the Biostatistics Core in the National Cancer Institute-funded Specialized Program on Research Excellence in Gastrointestinal Cancer at U-M. He serves on the editorial boards of several statistics and medical journals and on review panels of the NSF and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also serves as an expert panelist for the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sen serves on doctoral thesis committees for students in multiple departments in SPH, Medical School and LSA. His mentoring of Medical School residents, junior faculty, and postdoctoral fellows on issues such as grant funding, publications, and conference presentations helps them build their careers while enhancing the university’s research reputation.
Distinguished Faculty Governance Award
Karen Staller has labored to create an equitable and inclusive academic environment by balancing the collective well-being and protection of individual faculty rights. As a member and chair of the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs (SACUA) and in other leadership roles, she has identified and addressed U-M policies and procedures that could compromise those rights.
At the School of Social Work, she is a member of the Dean’s Search Advisory Committee and doctoral committee, and has also served as the school’s grievance officer, ombudsperson, and on the tenure and promotion and executive committees, among other roles.
A Senate Assembly representative from 2008-11, Staller was elected to SACUA, the executive arm of the University Senate and Senate Assembly, in 2011. As SACUA vice chair in 2012–13, she monitored faculty grievance cases and raised concerns about the lack of an appeal process. Elected SACUA chair in 2013-14, she identified problems with fitness for duty procedures in U-M’s Standard Practice Guide, proposed new language, and worked with the administration on changes. She represented faculty on a wide range of committees and on the Model Faculty Grievance Procedure Task Force.
Staller is author of “Runaways: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies” (2006) and co-editor of “Seeking Justice in Child Sexual Abuse: Shifting Burdens and Sharing Responsibilities” (2009). She is co-editor of “Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice,” serves on several editorial boards and was a long-standing board member of Ozone House, which serves homeless and high-risk youth.
Among other honors, she was elected to U-M’s chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi.
Regents Awards for Distinguished Public Service
Physician, researcher and health policy educator Dr. Matthew Davis is widely known for his leadership and innovations in health care research and policy reform. He is founding director of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, which has informed policy initiatives. Davis bridged the worlds of health care delivery and public health from March 2013 to April 2015 as chief medical executive of the Michigan Department of Community Health and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Recently appointed deputy director of U-M’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, Davis also originated and directs the Medical School’s Health Policy Path of Excellence program and serves on the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research leadership cabinet. As the state’s chief medical executive, Davis contributed to dozens of initiatives, including strategies to reduce infant mortality and the first statewide conference on high utilizers of health care.
He led efforts to increase Michigan’s immunization rates and the rollout of the state’s Healthy Michigan Plan to insure low-income adults. He also coordinated statewide efforts to create a system to handle potential cases of Ebola and other emerging pathogens, a plan the White House and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cited as an exemplar of timely, evidence-based policy implementation.
An award-winning professor and author of more than 200 journal articles, Davis has developed courses and case studies focused on health policy, including the massive open online course Understanding and Improving the U.S. Healthcare System. He also is founding Web editor of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine/JAMA Pediatrics. Davis has lectured at conferences, hospitals and universities, and has received the MICHR Distinguished Mentor Award and the national Nemours Child Health Services Research Award, among other accolades.
Regents Awards for Distinguished Public Service
Actor, writer and social entrepreneur Ashley Lucas is renowned for her groundbreaking scholarship on incarceration and her public service. As director of the U-M Prison Creative Arts Project, Lucas and her students help transform the lives of current and former prisoners, juveniles in detention, and their families through creative programs and services. The project coordinates arts workshops in prisons, trains students and volunteers to lead them, and curates an annual prison art show.
With the support of a LSA Teaching Transformed Grant, Lucas launched the Atonement Project, an arts-based restorative justice program. She also developed a student exchange program with Brazil’s federal university UNIRIO. She speaks about the project at academic conferences and prisons, universities, houses of worship, libraries and events such as Legislative Day in Lansing and U-M’s Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium.
Lucas performs her one-woman play, “Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass” (2004) in the United States and abroad. It is based on letters, interviews and personal experience as the child of an incarcerated parent. She co-edited “Razor Wire Women” (2011), a collection of essays, and runs the Razor Wire Women blog.
Lucas has served on several dissertation committees and advises undergraduates working on their theses and through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Her awards include an MCubed grant to digitally archive more than 5,000 images of art displayed over a 20-year period at the Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners.
Lucas coordinated the Residential College’s Committee on Engaged Learning and served on the Provost’s Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She is past president of the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Lucas serves on the advisory board of Open Hearts, Open Minds, which provides arts programming for incarcerated adults in Oregon.
University of Michigan Press Book Award
In “From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion” (2014), U-M alumna Katherine Crosby and co-author Andrei Markovits draw on history, philosophy and culture to present a compelling study of the canine rescue movement in the U.S. They examine the genesis and growth of breed-specific canine rescue, the preponderance of women among rescue activists, the rescue of stigmatized breeds, and the role of social media, among other topics.
The authors argue that breed-specific canine rescue organizations represent a cultural turn among Americans toward animals in general and reflect a rising legitimacy of the discourse of empathy and compassion that started in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a U-M undergraduate, Crosby enrolled in two of Markovits’ German politics courses, where she learned about the discourse of empathy and compassion and began researching the phenomenon. Breed-specific rescue organizations emerged in the 1990s as humans became more engaged in and committed to the welfare of dogs. Today, dogs are “fostered” by “foster moms and dads” and “adopted” by new “forever families” through such organizations, the authors note.
Crosby looks to earn a Master of Arts degree in public history and a certificate in museum management in December from the University of South Carolina, where she teaches the undergraduate course Social Advocacy and Ethical Life. Her current research focuses on the history of science and museums. As a graduate assistant at USC’s McKissick Museum, she manages collections, designs and creates exhibits, and researches folk life. She also volunteers at the South Carolina State Museum. Crosby, who received a five-year USC Presidential Teaching Fellowship, plans an academic career as a museum curator or professor.
University of Michigan Press Book Award
“From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion” (2014) by political scientist, sociologist and award-winning teacher Andrei Markovits and co-author Katherine Crosby is the culmination of his longtime scholarly interest in the “discourse of compassion.” It alters the way we treat people and ideas previously scorned by the social mainstream. The authors say that compassion has been a driving force in reshaping human-animal relations and public discourse, resulting in better conditions for animals in the United States.
Breed-specific canine rescue organizations, led primarily by women volunteers, are among the institutions that arose from this attitudinal and behavioral shift, identified by the authors as a “culture turn,” which led to an “animal turn” with animals becoming family members rather than property. From Property to Family, the first academic research on this development, explores the history of breed-specific canine rescue and rescue of stigmatized breeds, the rise of anti-cruelty statutes between 1970-2013 and more.
His background includes the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he chaired the Politics Department. A recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Markovits is the author and editor of many books, articles, conference papers and book reviews in English and 16 other languages. Topics have included German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements and the European right and left.
He also has worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America and teaches U-M’s popular Sports, Politics and Society course. Markovits has been recognized with U-M’s Golden Apple Award, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship, the Department of Political Science Tronstein Award for exceptional undergraduate teaching, and Best Professor honors by The Michigan Daily.
University Librarian Achievement Award
Jane Blumenthal, a nationally recognized health sciences librarian and past president of the Medical Library Association, is transforming the health sciences library field and how library users access and interact with information. She played a crucial role in the recent renovation and transformation of the A. Alfred Taubman Health Sciences Library building into a health sciences nexus of collaborative and self-directed learning.
The library is an integral part of the Medical School, College of Pharmacy, schools of Dentistry, Nursing and Public Health, and the U-M Health System. She worked closely with campus leaders on the library, expanding the range and richness of its services. Previously, she played a crucial role in creating a new library space at the North Campus Research Center, MLibrary@NCRC.
She has developed innovative programs in research and informatics, championed the collaborative role of librarian informationists, and improved information access for people with disabilities and outreach to those in underserved communities.
Blumenthal, a member of the University Library Executive Council and several other U-M committees, has a scholarly record including 56 articles and presentations at professional meetings. As MLA president in 2012-13, she spoke throughout the United States and abroad on issues relevant to health sciences library information. She served the association in many other roles, and also serves on the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Greater Midwest Regional Advisory Council and is active in the Association of American Medical Colleges and Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries.
She also has served as Bulletin of the Medical Library Association senior associate editor, a National Library of Medicine reviewer and Wilson Information Services scientific advisory board member.
University Librarian Recognition Award
Bioinformationist Marci Brandenburg is a leader in the rapidly developing field of bioinformatics, the application of computer technology for the management of biological information. Drawing on her deep knowledge of biology and information science, she delivers high-quality health and biomedical information services to researchers, clinicians and students at U-M health science schools, the U-M Health System and wider campus community.
Brandenburg works closely with U-M’s National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics, Bioinformatics Core, and Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics. She is the library’s informationist to other Medical School departments. She teaches courses and webinars on network visualization tools, such as Cytoscape, and has created instructional materials for Web-based tools including MetScape and LRpath.
She shares her skills internationally through the tranSMART Foundation, a nonprofit that advances collaborative translational research, where she serves on the tranSMART Foundation 3C Community Committee, and contributed to the organization’s website. Recently invited to teach Cytoscape at the University of Puerto Rico, she also has presented at the Medical School’s Researchpalooza, U-M’s Advanced Research Computing Cyberinfrastructure Days, and at Medical Library Association meetings and bioinformatics conferences. She has authored 24 journal articles and poster presentations.
An excellent instructor and mentor, Brandenburg teaches important components of a graduate level bioinformatics class in the DCM&B and supervises SI students working at the Taubman Library and on MCubed initiative projects that she helped design. Known for her strong work ethic, organizational skills, and sensitivity to cultural differences, Brandenburg chairs U-M’s Informatics Interest Group and Librarians’ Forum Salary Standing Committee.
She is a member of the University Library Data Landscape and Infrastructure Committee, Green Team, MLibrary Assessment Committee, and Emergent Research Working Group. Brandenburg has contributed significantly to U-M’s applications for National Institutes of Health Big Data to Knowledge initiative grants.
