Faculty standouts named professors of distinction

 

Professors Jeffrey N. Cox and John P. Cumalat have been named 2014 College Professors of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of their exceptional service, teaching and research.

This highly revered title is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international acclaim whose college peers also recognize as exceptionally talented teachers and colleagues. Honorees of this award hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU-Boulder.

Cox and Cumalat will be honored on Tuesday, Sept. 16, in the Old Main Chapel on campus. Both professors will give brief lectures on their research.

The lectures begin at 4 p.m., and a reception in the CU Heritage Center Museum on the third floor of Old Main will follow the presentations.

This event is free and open to the public.

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.

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.

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.

Cox’s presentation is titled: “Professing Romanticism: Interconnections Between Literature and Society During the Romantic Period.” Cumalat’s presentation is titled: “Solving the Long-Standing Puzzle of the Standard Model of Particle Physics — Finding the Higgs Boson.”

Cumalat notes that on July 4, 2012, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations working at the Large Hadron Collider announced a particle with many of the properties of the Higgs Boson, the last missing piece of the Standard Model of fundamental particles and forces.

Barely a year later, the theorists who predicted the particle won the 2013 Nobel Prize. “In my talk, I will introduce the field of high-energy physics and describe the CMS project in Europe. I will present our groups’ results for evidence of the new particle and outline what we have learned and our plans for the future,” Cumalat said.

For more information on Professor Cox and Professor Cumalat, click here.

Sept. 2, 2014