The honorific title College Professor of Distinction is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international distinction who are also recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent.


 

2021 PROFESSORS OF DISTINCTION

Chris DeSouza | Department of Integrative Physiology

DeSouza

Chris DeSouza

Chris DeSouza’s research is focused on the effects of cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors, HIV-1 infection and, most recently, spinal cord injury on vascular endothelial cell function (how well the inner lining of cells are functioning) and repair. His laboratory also studies the effects of lifestyle and pharmacological interventions on vascular endothelial cell biology.

DeSouza earned his PhD in exercise/applied physiology from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1995. He joined the CU Boulder faculty as a postdoctoral researcher the same year and became an assistant professor here in 1999.

He has directed the Integrative Vascular Biology Laboratory at CU Boulder since 1999, and the University of Colorado Boulder Clinical and Translational Research Center since 2008.

He received a Clinical Research Award from the American Diabetes Association in 2002, became a fellow of the American Heart Association in 2007, and earned an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association in 2008. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1995.

Nan Goodman | Department of English

Goodman

Nan Goodman

Nan Goodman teaches and writes about 17th- through 19th-century American literature and culture, the intersections of American law and literature, and the early Jewish American experience. She is especially interested in cultural manifestations of social inclusion and exclusion and questions about identity. 

She is the author of three books on early American law and literature: The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination; Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England; and Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America. She is working on a book, tentatively titled Sabbatai Sevi Comes to America, which stems from her research on the legacy of the false Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Sevi. She has also co-edited two volumes of essays, one on religion in America and the other on law and humanities in 19th-century America.

Goodman earned a PhD in English from Harvard University in 1992 after having earned a JD from Stanford Law School in 1985. She joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1992 and has also been an adjunct professor in the CU School of Law as well as a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School. She directed the university’s Jewish Studies Program from 2015-19 and is a member of its faculty.

She won the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarly and Creative Work in 2019, was named a Kingdon Fellow by the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019, and taught as a Fulbright Scholar at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 2014.

Michael Ritzwoller | Department of Physics

Ritzwoller

Michael Ritzwoller

Michael Ritzwoller is a theoretical geophysicist who works broadly to develop and apply new methods to image earth structures from local through global scales. His recent work has focused on developing methods to exploit seismic ambient noise to resolve isotropic (uniform) and anisotropic (varied) earth structures in the crust and upper mantle, particularly across the US and China. He has also worked in normal mode seismology, helioseismology (the study of the sun), ocean acoustics and shallow subsurface imaging using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and seismic waves.

He earned a PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in 1987. After doing a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University, Ritzwoller joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1990. He has served as co-director of the university’s Joint Seismic Program Center, was a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), was director of the Center for Imaging the Earth’s Interior, and is chair of the Department of Physics.

Ritzwoller was the American Geophysical Union’s Gutenberg Lecturer in 2013 and was named an American Geophysical Union fellow in 2005. He has won two CU Faculty Fellowships and was named a fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1990. He has published more than 125 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Paul Youngquist | Department of English

Paul Youngquist

Paul Youngquist

Paul Youngquist’s research focuses on relations between European and African cultures in the late 18th-century West Indies, specifically their mutual contribution to the cultural flowering called British Romanticism. He mixes archival and theoretical resources with fieldwork to examine the role dislocated Africans play in the economic and cultural production of the late 18th-century Anglophone world.

Youngquist is the author of A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, a book about the artist who is credited with creating “space music” as a means of building a better future for American Black people. He also edited Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic and Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective.

Youngquist earned a PhD from the University of Virginia in 1988 and also earned a BA, magna cum laude, from CU Boulder in 1980.

Among the awards he’s won are a Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence Award in 2018, CU Boulder Kayden Awards in 2009 and 2012 and a George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1991.


 

2020 PROFESSORS OF DISTINCTION

Elspeth Dusinberre | Department of Classics

Elspeth Dusinberre

Elspeth Dusinberre

Dusinberre earned her PhD in classical art and archaeology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1997 and joined the CU Boulder faculty that year. She is interested in cultural interactions in Anatolia, particularly in the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE). Her first book, Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis (Cambridge 2003), focuses on the Lydian capital.  Her second book is a diachronic excavation monograph, Gordion Seals and Sealings: Individuals and Society (Philadelphia 2005). Her third book, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia (Cambridge 2013), won the 2015 Wiseman Award, proposes a new model for understanding imperialism.

Dusinberre teaches primarily Greek and Near Eastern archaeology at CU Boulder. She is a President's Teaching Scholar and has been awarded twelve University of Colorado teaching awards.

Michelle Ellsworth | Department of Theatre and Dance

Ellsworth earned her MFA in dance from CU Boulder in 2000 and joined the faculty that year.

Michelle Ellsworth

Michelle Ellsworth

She is a dancer, choreographer, video maker, sculptor, writer and cartoonist. Dance is her native language as an artist; however, she regularly produces work that combines these and other genres and media. Her work is consistently shaped by, 1) her fluency not only in movement, but also in text, computers, improvisation, drawing, and video, and 2) her curiosity about gender, objects, identity, ritual, and the embodied and problematic human condition.

Among Ellsworth’s honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Impact Award, a NEFA National Dance Project Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, and a USA Artists Knight Fellowship in Dance. She has received three National Performance Network Creation Fund Commissions.

Pieter T.J. Johnson | Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Johnson, who earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006, is broadly interested in what he calls the “dark side of biology”:

Pieter T.J. Johnson

Pieter T.J. Johnson

the ecology of infectious diseases and invasive species. Johnson notes that both have important consequences not only for individuals and populations, but for entire ecological communities and ecosystem processes. 

Parasites and pathogens are an integrated component of all major food webs, and he notes that understanding how infectious diseases respond to environmental changes requires approaches that embrace the dynamic interactions among hosts, pathogens and other species in a community.Johnson’s research program is directed at three interrelated focal areas: the community ecology of infectious diseases in both humans and wildlife; effective conservation of aquatic communities and ecosystems; and the effects of climate change on host-parasite dynamics.

Katharine N. Suding | Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Suding earned her PhD in ecology, evolution and organismal biology from the University of Michigan in 1999 and joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2014.

Katharine N. Suding

Katharine N. Suding

She directs the Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Program for the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and is a plant community ecologist working at the interface of ecosystem, landscape and population biology. Her goal is to apply cutting-edge “usable” science to the challenges of restoration, species invasion and environmental change.

She and her research group work with a range of conservation groups, government agencies and land managers to provide evidence-based solutions that take into account biodiversity, human well-being and management opportunities. They employ a combination of long-term monitoring, modeling and experimental approaches in settings that range from alpine tundra to oak woodlands to grasslands. 


 

2019 PROFESSORS OF DISTINCTION

Noel Clark | Department of Physics

Noel Clark

Noel Clark

Noel Clark received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1970. He subsequently held the positions of research fellow and assistant professor of applied physics at Harvard, before moving to CU Boulder in 1977.

Research in Clark's group is directed toward understanding and using the properties of condensed phases, ranging from experiments on the fundamental physics of phase transitions, such as melting, to the development of liquid crystal electro-optic light valves.  The primary experimental tools are laser light scattering, electrooptics, video microscopy and high resolution synchrotron X-ray scattering. Much of the research is on the physics of liquid crystals, phases of matter having structure intermediate to that of liquids and solids, and on the physics of colloids, suspensions of one material in another that exhibit order on large length scales. These materials have become important testing grounds for modern theories of phase transitions, which is the principal focus of research.

Stephen Graham Jones | Department of English

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English. He received his PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Florida State University in 1998, and came to CU in 2008. At that time, he had five novels and one story collection published. 

Since then he's published 11 more novels, five more story collections, and some novellas and comic books and chap books, and he's currently got “north of 300 stories” published. He has been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Wonderland Book Award, and the Colorado Book Award. 

He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels, and will soon receive the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award. At CU Boulder he's won the Carolyn Woodward Pope Prize for Faculty Publication, the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Research Award, and the Kayden Book Award, and he's a faculty affiliate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Center for the American West, and the Department of Ethnic Studies. 

Aside from teaching fiction and screenwriting workshops, Jones teaches courses on comic books, the haunted house, the slasher, the zombie and the werewolf. His fiction navigates the spaces between the commercial and the literary, often using the tropes of horror and fantasy and science fiction and the western and noir in unconventional ways. He says he's not running out of stories anytime soon, either.

Kenneth P. Wright Jr. | Department of Integrative Physiology

Kenneth P. Wright Jr.

Kenneth P. Wright Jr.

Kenneth P. Wright Jr. is a professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology and the director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at CU-Boulder. 

Wright received a BS in psychology from the University of Arizona (1990) and a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from Bowling Green State University (1996). Following postdoctoral training in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School prior to joining the faculty at CU Boulder in 2002.

Wright has more than 25 years of experience in sleep and circadian research, has led individual and multicenter/transdisciplinary team projects, and has participated in multicenter clinical trials. His research aims to understand the physiology of sleep and circadian rhythms in humans and the health and safety consequences of sleep and circadian disruption—such as, metabolic dysregulation, impaired cognition, and compromised performance. 

Wright’s research also explores strategies to promote sleep, enhance alertness and maintain health and safety when sleep and circadian rhythms are challenged, as well as treatment strategies for patients with sleep and circadian related disorders. 

He is a frequently invited speaker and media contact and has published more than 115 peer-reviewed articles. Wright manages a large undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate training program in sleep and circadian physiology at CU Boulder.

Wright has served in leadership, consulting, and advisory roles for government, professional, community, and commercial stakeholders, such as, the Sleep Disorders Research Advisory Board of the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the Board of Directors of the Sleep Research Society. He also serves as a reviewer for numerous national and international granting agencies and scientific journals.

Robert Pasnau | Department of Philosophy

Robert Pasnau

Robert Pasnau

Robert Pasnau has taught in the Department of Philosophy since 1999. His research concentrates on the history of philosophy, particularly the end of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the modern era. 

He is the editor of the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy and of Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy. His most recent book, After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions (OUP 2017), is based on his Isaiah Berlin Lectures, delivered at Oxford University in 2014. 

Pasnau is the founding director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization.


 

2018 PROFESSORS OF DISTINCTION

Mitchell C. Begelman | Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences 

Mitch

Mitchell Begelman

Mitchell Begelman is a professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and a fellow of JILA. He received A.B. and A.M. degrees in physics from Harvard University in 1974 and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1978, and joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1983, following postdoctoral work at Berkeley and Cambridge. 

Begelman works on a wide range of topics in theoretical astrophysics, and is particularly interested in how black holes interact with their cosmic environments. In addition to more than 220 scholarly articles, he has published two books aimed at a general audience, Gravity’s Fatal Attraction (with Martin Rees) and Turn Right at Orion, and created a popular lower-division course on black holes for non-science majors.  

Begelman has received a number of honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship and the Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society.  He served as chair of the APS Department from 1995 to 1998 and from 2008 to 2014.

Christopher Braider | Department of French and Italian 

braider

Christoper Braider

Christopher Braider received his BA (1973) and PhD (1982) from Trinity College, Dublin, and came to CU Boulder as an associate professor in 1992 after 10 years on the faculty at Harvard. He was promoted to professor of French and comparative literature in 2003, has chaired the Departments of French and Italian and Comparative Literature and Humanities, and served as transitional dean of the College of Media, Communication, and Information in 2014-15. 

He has won five teaching honors, including CU’s Best Should Teach Gold Award in 2016. He works in the fields of early modern European literary, artistic, and intellectual culture, exploring the multi-faceted interconnections between literature, theater, visual art, natural philosophy, and political theology. 

He is the author of Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700(Princeton, 1993), Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama(North Carolina, 2002), Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads(Routledge, 2004), The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes(Toronto, 2012), and Experimental Selves: Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2018). The Matter of Mindwas awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies in 2013.

Janet Jacobs | Department of Women and Gender Studies

jacobs

Janet Jacobs

Janet Jacobs is a professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and holds an appointment in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on ethnic and religious violence, gender, mass trauma and collective memory. Her studies in the field cover a wide range of areas on gendered and racialized violence in the Americas and in eastern and western Europe.  

Her internationally recognized work has contributed to global efforts to support women and children in the aftermath of mass trauma. She is author of five books, numerous articles, and two edited volumes.  

Her award winning monographs include Hidden Heritage; The Legacy of the Crypto-Jewsand The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors. She is a recipient of the Hazel Barnes Award.   


2017 PROFESSORS OF DISTINCTION

Mark Amerika | Department of Art and Art History

amerika

Mark Amerika

Mark Amerika's artwork has exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-10, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition titled UNREALTIME. In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, often considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 — remixthebook.com), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007), remixthecontext (Routledge, 2017) and the novels The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood (both with FC2/University of Alabama). His transmedia art work, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. In the spring of 2017, Amerika was the first American artist to have a survey exhibition of digital artwork in Havana. He is the founding director of the Doctoral Program in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance and a professor of art and art history.

Martha Palmer | Department of Linguistics

palmer

Martha Palmer

Martha Palmer is a professor of linguistics, and the Helen & Hubert Croft Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department. She is also an Institute of Cognitive Science Faculty Fellow, a co-Director of CLEAR and an Association of Computational Linguistics Fellow. She received a BFA 2010 Research Award, was the director of the 2011 Linguistics Institute at CU Boulder and was named an outstanding graduate advisor in 2014. She was the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1985, and was an associate professor in computer and information sciences at Penn for six years before coming to Colorado in 2005. Her research is focused on capturing elements of the meanings of words that can comprise automatic representations of complex sentences and documents. In artificial intelligence, supervised machine-learning techniques rely on vast amounts of annotated training data, so she and her students provide data with semantic annotation for English, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Hindi and Urdu, funded by DARPA and NSF, both manually and automatically. A more recent focus is the application of these methods to biomedical journal articles and clinical notes, funded by NIH, and the geosciences, funded by NSF. She co-edits LiLT, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, and has been a co-editor of Natural Language Engineering and on the Computational Linguistics Editorial Board.

Mark C. Serreze | Department of Geography

serene

Mark C. Serreze

Mark C. Serreze is a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow of the CU Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and director of the CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center. He specializes in Arctic climate research, including atmosphere-sea ice interactions, synoptic climatology, boundary layer problems, numerical weather prediction and climate change. His research over the past decade has increasingly focused on making sense of the rapid environmental changes unfolding in the Arctic. He has conducted fieldwork in the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic on tundra, sea ice and glaciers. Serreze has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed literature, and is recognized as a Thompson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher. In 2014, he was elected fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He has published an award-winning textbook, The Arctic Climate System (now in its second edition), and teaches a course in the CU Department of Geography under the same title. His popular science book, Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North, is in production as of summer 2017. Serreze has testified before the U.S. Congress, is a frequent media contact on issues of climate and climate change, and has appeared in television documentaries.


2016 PROFESSOR OF DISTINCTION

Warren Motte | Department of French and Italian

Motte

Motte

Warren Motte received an A.B. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, a Maîtrise in Anglo-American Literature from the Université de Bordeaux, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. He came to CU in 1987 as an Associate Professor, having spent the first five years of his career at the University of Nebraska. Professor of French and Comparative Literature, he specializes in contemporary writing, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. He is the author of The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec (1984), Questioning Edmond Jabès (1990), Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (1995), Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (1999), Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), and Mirror Gazing (2014). He is the editor of nine other volumes, and he serves on a variety of editorial boards and advisory committees, in this country and in France. He has received awards for teaching, for service, and for scholarship. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms for career services rendered to French culture.


2015 PROFESSORS OF DISTINCTION

Susan K. Kent | Department of History

kent

Kent

Susan Kent is a professor of history at CU-Boulder. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative history at Brandeis University in 1984. After a few stints as a visiting professor, she took up a postdoc at the University of Rochester in 1987 and 1988. She moved to the University of Florida in 1988 and then to CU in 1993. That year, she also held a National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has spent most of her career as a British historian, specializing in gender and empire, but lately she has broadened her scope to encompass global or world history. She is the author of 11 books (two of them co-authored) and is currently writing a global history of the 1930s with a former student. She worked as associate vice chancellor for faculty affairs between 2001 and 2005 and served as chair of the Department of History from 1998 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2014.

Carole E. Newlands | Department of Classics

Newlands

Newlands

Carole Newlands has been a professor of classics at CU Boulder since 2009. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor at Cornell University, an associate professor at UCLA and a full professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, serving four years as the department chair. She has held research fellowships at Clare Hall Cambridge and at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. She also served on the editorial board of the journals Viator, Classical Antiquity and American Journal of Philology and was a director of the Classics Association of America. In spring 2010, she was visiting NEH professor at the University of Richmond. In the summer of 2010, she held the position of William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand. In 2016, she will be a research fellow at the Center for Humanities at the National University of Australia, Canberra. In addition, she is the author of more than 40 articles on classical and medieval topics, and she has published several books, including Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Cornell University Press 1995); Statius Siluae and the Poetics of Empire (Cambridge 2002); Siluae Book 2 (Cambridge Greek and Latin series 2011); Statius: a Poet between Rome and Naples (London 2012); Ovid: an introduction (London 2015). She is also co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Ovid (Oxford 2014); The Brill Companion to Statius (Leiden 2015); and Ancient Campania (Illinois 2015). Her new work involves travel in the imperial Roman world and the role that the classics played in Scottish culture.

Richard K. Olson | Department of Psychology

Olson

Olson

Richard K. Olson is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and a fellow of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1970 and joined the CU-Boulder faculty that same year. Professor Olson is a developmental cognitive psychologist with expertise in the area of genetic and environmental influences on reading and related skills. He has served as president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and received the society’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 2006. He has also been an active member of the International Dyslexia Association and received its Norman Geschwind Memorial Lecture Award in 2005. His highly collaborative research program on reading ability and disability has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health since 1979. In 1990, he co-founded the Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center (CLDRC) with John DeFries, and he has served as the center’s principal investigator and director since 2005. In 2000, he co-founded the International Longitudinal Twin Study (ILTS) of reading and attention with Brian Byrne in Australia and Stefan Samuelsson in Sweden. The CLDRC and ILTS research with identical and fraternal twins and their DNA has shown that most of the population variance in reading ability and disability is due to genetic influences, although as co-investigator Janice Keenan has shown, genes influencing word reading differ somewhat from those influencing comprehension. Together with co-investigators Bruce Pennington and Erik Willcutt, they have also shown that there are shared genetic influences on attention, executive function and reading ability. Evidence for genetic influences emphasizes the need for extraordinary environmental support for many children with reading disabilities. Professor Olson has worked with his former Ph.D. student Barbara Wise to show how computer programs in the Boulder Valley schools can help provide this support.


2014

Jeffrey N. Cox | Department of English

cox

Cox

Jeffrey N. Cox received his B.A. from Wesleyan University (1975) and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia (1981) and rose through the ranks at Texas A&M University. He moved to CU-Boulder in 1998 as the first full-time Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts; he is a Professor of English, of Comparative Literature, and of Humanities. Recognized by the Keats-Shelley Association of America with its Distinguished Scholar Award in 2009, he is the author or editor of 10 volumes, including In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (1987), acknowledged in 2011 by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism as a “Book that Shaped the Field,” Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Shelley, Keats, Hunt, and their Circle(1998), granted the Best Book Award of the South Central Modern Language Association, and Keats’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (2008). His Romanticism in the Shadow of War: The Culture of the Napoleonic War Years will appear Fall 2014 from Cambridge University Press. He currently serves as Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs.

John P. Cumalat | Department of Physics

Cumulate

Cumalat

John P. Cumalat is a Professor of Physics and past-Chair of the Department of Physics (1996-2008). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, served as a postdoc and Wilson Fellow at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1981. Dr. Cumalat is an experimentalist in high-energy physics and particle physics. He has worked on several experiments. He was spokesperson for two Fermilab experiments studying charm quarks and played a leading role in designing and constructing the highest energy photon beam. Since 2005, he has worked at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, on the Compact Muon Spectrometer (CMS) experiment, and he is a co-discoverer of the Higgs boson. Currently he is searching for evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. He also works on developing radiation-tolerant sensors.


2013

Barbara Demmig-Adams | Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Adams

Demmig-Adams

Barbara Demmig-Adams was born and raised in Germany, and received her degrees in plant biology (doctorate in 1984 and habilitation in 1989) from the University of Würzburg, Germany. She was postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Stanford) from 1984-1986. After returning to the University of Würzburg, she discovered that a group of plant carotenoids acts to avert damage from excess absorbed sunlight in a photoprotective process, without which photosynthetic organisms would not be able to provide food, fuel, materials, and other services to all other lifeforms. In 1989, she moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, with her husband William W. Adams III, together with whom she discovered differences in the manifestation of the photoprotection of photosynthesis in different plant species and environments. Her current research focuses on integrating photosynthesis with other plant functions, and on algal biofuels. She has been a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology since 1990. She is recipient of a 1992-1997 Packard Fellowship, of BFA awards in research (2006) and teaching (2010), was elected to Leopoldina (joint National Academies of Sciences of Germany, Austria and Switzerland) in 2011. She is a Highly Cited Researcher (<0.5% of publishing researchers) in the Plant & Animal Science category (ISI).


2012

Natalie Ahn | Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Ahn

Ahn

Natalie Ahn received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Washington (1979), and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (1985), where she studied mechanistic enzymology with Judith Klinman. She carried out postdoctoral studies at the Univ. of Washington, first as an NRSA fellow with Christoph de Haën and later as a Merck Fellow with Edwin Krebs, where she discovered key regulators of the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase pathway, which are important targets for anti-cancer therapies. She came to CU-Boulder in 1992, and is Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Director of the Predoctoral Training Program in Signaling and Cellular Regulation, and Associate Director of the BioFrontiers Institute. Current research investigates enzymatic and cellular mechanisms underlying cell signaling, uses technologies in functional proteomics and hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry for signal transduction research.

Keith Maskus | Department of Economics

Maskus

Maskus

Keith Maskus received his BA from Knox College in 1976 and his PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1981, when he joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has had visiting appointments as Senior Economist at the U.S. Department of State, Lead Economist at the World Bank, and as Visiting Scholar at the University of Bocconi, Peking University, and the CES-Ifo Institute at the University of Munich. He holds the rank of Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide and is a Research Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Kiel Institute for World Economics. Maskus consults widely on issues of international trade policy and intellectual property rights, including for the World Bank, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the World Trade Organization. He is the author of over 100 published articles and author or editor of 14 books and monographs. His most recent authored volume is Private Rights and Public Problems: the Global Economics of Intellectual Property Rights, which is to be published in late 2012 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Maskus currently serves as the Associate Dean for Social Sciences.


2011

Chris Greene | Department of Physics

Greene

Greene

Chris Greene grew up in eastern Nebraska and attended Ashland-Greenwood High School, and then went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1976. He earned a PhD in theoretical atomic physics from the University of Chicago in 1980 under Ugo Fano, followed by a postdoctoral stint at Stanford University with Richard Zare. His first faculty appointment was at Louisiana State University, from 1981-1988, and he has been on the CU faculty as Professor of Physics and a Fellow of JILA since 1989, serving as Chair of JILA during 2005-2006.
 

 

Steve Chan | Political Science

chan

Chan

Professor Chan received his B.A. from Tulane University in 1970, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1976. He joined the University of Colorado in 1984. He was the recipient of two Fulbright awards, and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Foreign Policy Section of the International Studies Association. Most recently, he received fellowship grants from the East Asia Institute and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. He has taught as visiting faculty in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and France. His publications include fourteen books, the latest of which is entitled Looking for Balance: China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia (Stanford University Press, 2012). His broad research and teaching interests pertain to theories of international relations and political economy, especially as they are applied to East Asia. He is currently serving as the director of the Farrand Residence Academic Program.


2010

Leslie Leinwand | Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

leinwand

Leinwand

Dr. Leinwand is a Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB) Professor and Director of the Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She was recruited to be Chair of MCDB in 1995. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, her PhD from Yale University and did post-doctoral training at Rockefeller University. She joined the faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1981 and remained there until moving to Colorado. While at Albert Einstein she became a Full Professor and was Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center. Once moved to Colorado, along with Michael Bristow, she founded the intercampus University of Colorado Cardiovascular Institute which promotes research and training in cardiovascular disease. They, along with Eric Olson at the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, founded Myogen, Inc. which was recently sold to Gilead Pharmaceuticals. More recently, she was a co-founder of Hiberna, Inc, a biotechnology company using pythons and hibernating ground squirrels to develop novel pharmaceuticals. Her work as a cardiac biologist is of importance to both basic scientists and clinicians. The interests of Dr. Leinwand’s laboratory are the genetics and molecular physiology of inherited diseases of the heart and how gender and diet modify the heart. The study of these diseases has required multidisciplinary approaches, involving molecular biology, mouse genetics, mouse cardiac physiology, and the analysis of human tissues. To accomplish this, Dr. Leinwand has developed a highly collaborative group in Boulder, bringing together specialized basic scientists and clinical cardiologists. Her laboratory’s efforts are well-funded by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and her teaching is recognized by funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Professor Program. She is also the Principle Investigator of the HHMI program called the Biological Sciences Initiative which supports undergraduate research, K-12 outreach and educational programs for high school teachers.

 

Fred Anderson | Department of History

Anderson

Anderson

Fred Anderson received his B.A. from Colorado State University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. He has taught in the CU History department since 1983. In addition to two CU Faculty Fellowships, he has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center of Harvard University, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is the author or editor of five books, including Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000), which won the Francis Parkman Prize and inspired the Public Broadcasting System television series The War That Made America(2005). Together with Andrew Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) he has most recently published The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2005). He and Cayton are currently writing Imperial America, 1672-1764, a volume that they hope to live long enough to see published in the Oxford History of the United States.


2009

Juri Toomre | Astrophysics

Juri

Toomre

Juri Toomre is intrigued by the complex fluid motions within stars like our Sun that allow such great balls of gas to rotate differentially and to build strong magnetic fields that burst out of their surfaces. Such work in theoretical astrophysics is aided by Juri’s research group carrying out major numerical simulations of the interaction of turbulent convection with rotation and magnetism, now feasible with massively parallel supercomputers. To guide and challenge such theory, Juri is an active participant in helioseismology that deduces the inner workings of our nearest star by observing its oscillations from space and ground. He did his undergraduate studies at M.I.T (1963) and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge (1967). Juri joined CU in 1971, and is a Professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and a Fellow of JILA.

 

John Wahr | Physics and CIRES

Wahr

Wahr

John Wahr is a Professor of Physics and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. He received his PhD from the University of Colorado in 1979, and joined the CU faculty in 1983. Wahr is a geophysicist. He has worked on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the Earth’s core and mantle, to groundwater and ice sheets, to the atmosphere and oceans, to planetary moons. During the last few years, much of his research has involved using various kinds of satellite observations to monitor and better understand ongoing changes in the distribution of water on Earth, in both liquid and solid (snow and ice) form.

 

John O’Loughlin | Geography

O

O'Loughlin

John O’Loughlin is Professor of Geography and Faculty Research Associate in the Political and Economic Change Program of the Institute of Behavioral Science. He received his BA (Hons) degree from University College Dublin (1969) and his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 1973. He was at the University of Illinois for 15 years before joining the CU-Boulder faculty in 1988. Professor O’Loughlin’s specialty is political geography with a concentration on the geographic distributions and causes of conflict. His field research has focused on the post-Communist societies of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, with a particular interest in nationalist mobilization, inter-ethnic relations, and the dynamics of local wars. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Alexander von Humboldt foundations. He teaches introductory human geography classes as well as advanced classes for International Affairs and Geography majors. He has served as Chair of the geography department and has been editor of Political Geography since its founding in 1981.

 

Jerry W. Rudy | Psychology and Neurosciences

Rudy

Rudy

Jerry W. Rudy, Professor, received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1970 from the University of Virginia. He joined the University of Colorado Department of Psychology and Neuroscience in 1980, after holding faculty positions at the University of Rochester and Princeton University. He served as chair of the department from 1995 to 2003. Dr. Rudy’s work is in the area of learning and memory and his research has focused on understanding the contribution of the hippocampus to memory. He is the author of a recently published book, The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Outside of his academic pursuits he has been actively engaged as a tennis player and coach and in honing his skills as a guitarist, including a two-year stint in a local gypsy jazz band. He has twice served as President of the Board of Directors of Imagine!, for the Boulder County center for developmental disabilities.


2008

Alison Jaggar | Philosophy

Jaguar

Jaggar

Alison Jaggar established her reputation as both a pioneer in feminist philosophy and a founder of the discipline of women and gender studies. She arrived at CU-Boulder in 1990 and currently teaches in both Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies. During the 1990s, Jaggar’s research focused mainly on moral epistemology, exploring the possibility of cross-cultural social criticism in contexts of diversity and inequality. For the past ten years, Jaggar has been working in the area of global gender justice, investigating the gendered dimensions of the moral and political issues that are raised by increasing integration of the global economic and political order.

 

Doug Seals | Integrative Physiology

Seals

Seals

Doug Seals joined the faculty at UC Boulder in 1992 and currently is Professor of Integrative Physiology. His broad research interest is the integrative physiology and pathophysiology of aging with a particular focus on “arterial aging”. Dr. Seals’ laboratory provides research training from the undergraduate to postdoctoral levels and is supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging. He teaches courses on the physiology of aging and on professional skills for the research scientist. The research goals of Dr. Seals' Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory are to determine: 1) important changes in physiological function with aging; 2) modulation of those changes by biological factors (e.g., adiposity, estrogen deficiency) and lifestyle behaviors (e.g., physical activity/inactivity, diet); 3) the efficacy of lifestyle and pharmacological interventions for reversing adverse changes in physiological function with aging; 4) the integrative (systemic to molecular) biological mechanisms that mediate physiological changes with aging and the effects of modulating influences and interventions on those changes. Our primary focus is 'vascular aging', in particular the development of large elastic artery stiffness and impaired arterial endothelial function with advancing age. A wide range of contemporary experimental techniques are employed to study these issues in human subjects, rodents, and cell culture.

 

Michael Shull | Astrophysics

Shull

Shull

Michael Shull is Professor of Astrophysics and past-Chair of the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech (1972) and his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University (1976). After working as a researcher at UC Berkeley, he joined the CU faculty in fall 1977. Dr. Shull’s research is in theoretical astrophysics and space astronomy. His astronomical interests include studies of gas between the stars and galaxies, exploding stars (supernovae), and galaxy formation. He and his studentsand postdocs are frequent users of the Hubble Space Telescope, including a new CU instrument to be installed on Hubble in 2009.

Payson Sheets | Anthropology

Sheets

Sheets

Payson Sheets, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, is a leading expert in the archeology of Mesoamerica and the Intermediate Area of lower Central America, focusing on the interrelationships between human societies and volcanic processes in tropical climates. He has incorporated remote sensing with geophysical data to detect and explore the remains of human activity in Central America. His recent research has focused on the Ceren site, catastrophically buried by the eruption of nearby Loma Caldera volcano in AD 590. At this remarkable site, structures are preserved, including their thatch roofs and their entire artifactual contents, and fields with their cultigens are intact. Undergraduate and graduate students are included in field and laboratory research. Professor Sheets has won numerous research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, NASA and the Colorado Historical Society. He has published 10 books, more than 20 book chapters, and dozens of refereed journal articles.


2007

Gerard Hauser | Communication

Hauser

Hauser

Jerry Hauser joined the faculty at CU Boulder in 1993 as Professor of Communication. He also has been a contributing faculty member to Comparative Literature since 1995. His research focuses on the history of rhetorical theory, the role of rhetoric in a democracy, and the interaction between formal and vernacular rhetoric within the public sphere. His theoretical and critical work includes development of the reticulate model of public spheres, the vernacular rhetoric model of public opinion, and developing, with his doctoral students, integration of ethnographic and critical methods for studying vernacular discourse.

 

Alice Healy | Psychology

Healy

Healy

Alice Healy received her doctorate from The Rockefeller University in 1973 and was on the faculty of Yale University from 1973 to 1981. She joined the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1981 and is currently College Professor of Distinction and Director of the Center for Research on Training there. She is also currently the principal investigator of a cooperative agreement from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Grant from the Army Research Office.

 

Charles Judd | Psychology

Judd

Judd

Charles “Chick” Judd received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976. He joined the faculty of the Psychology Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1981. In 1997 he became Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, only to return one year later to rejoin his colleagues at CU. His research and teaching contributions have been in two areas: Social cognition and Behavioral research methods. In the former, he has been particularly interested in issues of stereotyping, intergroup relations, and social judgment. In the latter, he has written extensively on the analysis of behavioral data, with particular interests in issues of mediation and moderation.

 

Russell Monson | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Monson

Monson

After taking a faculty position at the University of Colorado, Russell Monson discovered research collaborators among the many scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Laboratories in Boulder. Since the late 1980’s his research has focused on the interactions between forests and the atmosphere, especially with regard to climate change. Professor Monson has published over 140 papers in refereed journals and books and obtained consistent research support from the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.


2006

Mark Ablowitz | Applied Math

Ablowitz

Ablowitz

Mark Ablowitz is considered a pioneer in the field of applied mathematics, and his work in the field is among the most highly cited in the world. He is best known for his landmark contributions to the “inverse scattering transform,” or IST, a method used to solve nonlinear wave equations. Mathematicians and physicists have used the IST to gain a better understanding of phenomena such as water waves. Key themes in Professor Ablowitz’ research are the understanding of the nonlinear wave phenomena that arise in physical problems. Mathematical techniques employed are asymptotic approximations, numerical and exact methods to obtain solutions to the underlying equations. Frequently employed are methods to solve certain nonlinear wave equations by the Inverse Scattering Transform (IST). IST allows one to construct general solutions to certain initial-boundary value problems. The problems of interest arise in a variety of physical problems. Physical applications include nonlinear optics, water waves, lattice excitations and Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC). A special class of solutions are called solitons or solitary waves which are extremely stable localized waves. Ablowitz joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1989.

 

Robert Schulzinger | International Affairs/History

Bob

Schulzinger

Robert Schulzinger, who directs CU-Boulder’s International Affairs program, is an expert on U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy and contemporary U.S. politics. He is the former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is author or co-author of 12 books, including the award-winning “A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975.” A sequel, “A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War” will be published later this summer by Oxford University Press. He joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1977.

 

Michael Tooley | Philosophy

Dooley

Tooley

Michael Tooley’s current research is mainly in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of religion, where he has worked on questions about the nature of scientific laws, the nature of time and the existence of God. The author of six books and dozens of articles, Tooley has written about the moral issues raised by abortion, euthanasia and cloning. Professor Tooley’s primary research interests are in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and ethics. In metaphysics, his work is concerned with the nature of time, persistence through time, causation, and laws of nature, including the temporal asymmetry of the laws of physics. He joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1992.

 

Thomas Veblen | Geography

Veblen

Veblen

Thomas Veblen studies forest ecosystems in Argentina, Chile and Colorado, including the effects of fires and insect outbreaks on Colorado forests. He is an expert on the history of wildfires and fire ecology in the western United States and South America, using tree rings to understand the relationships between climate variation and wildfires. His research interests are in the areas of biogeography, forest ecology, and the ecological aspects of global environmental change. He has conducted research on how stand-scale and landscape-scale forest patterns result from interactions among natural disturbances, human activities, and recent climatic variation in Guatemala, Chile, New Zealand, Argentina and Colorado. The National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service support his work. He joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1981.