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Our
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The
Faculty
shapers of our culture and our society
In
this era of highly specialized knowledge, our scholars are earning
well-deserved distinction in their "respective lines,"
but some have achieved wider fame.
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Charles Wright and
Jerome
McGann
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This
year Charles Wright, one of the country's most eminent poets, was
elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Holder
of the Souder Family Professorship in English, Mr. Wright is a past
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and a National Book Award. In 1995, he was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the highest honors for a creative
artist.
Other
University faculty singled out for recognition this year include
• Lester Hoel, the L. A. Lacy Distinguished Professor of Engineering,
who was awarded the 2001 Wilbur S. Smith Distinguished Transportation
Educator Award from the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
•
Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, who
received the first Richard W. Lyman Award for using digital technology
to expand traditional notions of humanities teaching and scholarship.
•
Linda K. Bunker, the William Parrish Professor of Education and
a tireless advocate for girls and women in sport, who received the
Women Faculty and Professional Association's Woman of Achievement
Award.
• Ladislau Steiner, the Alumni Professor of Neurosurgery, who
received the Sugita Award for his work on the Gamma Knife, a neurosurgical
tool that allows a physician to perform brain surgery with gamma
rays rather than a scalpel, obviating the need to enter the skull.
•
John Monahan, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation
Professor of Law, who won the American Psychiatric Association's
Manfred S. Guttmacher Award for 2001 in recognition of his book
Rethinking Risk Assessment: The MacArthur Study of Mental Disorder
and Violence.
Scholars of Exceptional Promise
In the
long term, the vitality of our faculty will depend on a core group
of scholars who spend the majority of their careers at the University.
Accordingly, our deans and department chairs are working to recruit
exceptional young teachers and researchers and to support their
scholarship from the outset. The success of these efforts is evident
in the number of young faculty who have received major grants and
awards for their work. Some examples:
•
Barry Condron, assistant professor of biology, is one of five people
nationwide selected for the William Keck Foundation's Distinguished
Young Scholars in Medical Research Program. Mr. Condron will use
his $1 million award to further his investigation into how neurons
form connected networks in the brain, basic research that eventually
could lead to new therapies for brain injuries or Alzheimer's disease.
•
Filmmaker and photographer Kevin J. Everson, assistant professor
of art, received a 2001-2002 Rome Prize, which enables artists and
scholars to pursue in-depth projects at the American Academy in
Rome.
•
David Wotton, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular
genetics, was selected for a Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers. His nomination was sponsored by the National
Institutes of Health.
•
P. Todd Stukenberg, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular
genetics, is one of twenty promising biomedical researchers who
were named Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences in 2001 by The
Pew Charitable Trusts. The Pew program received nominations from
more than 120 institutions.
Chosen
to Serve
Committed
to serving the public interest as well as their academic disciplines,
University faculty are often tapped for positions of responsibility
in federal and state government and in their professional organizations.
This
past year, President Bush appointed Philip Zelikow, director of
the Miller Center of Public Affairs and the White Burkett Miller
Professor of History, to serve on the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board. This is a critical appointment in our post-September
11 world. The board's mission is to assess the quality, quantity,
and adequacy of intelligence collection and analysis and has the
authority to review the performance of all agencies of the federal
government engaged in intelligence work.
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George
Garrett
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Other
recent appointments include
• George Garrett, the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing
Emeritus, who was named poet laureate of Virginia by Governor Mark
Warner.
•
Christoph Leeman, an internationally renowned physicist, who was
appointed director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson
National Accelerator Facility in Newport News.
• R. Scott Jones, M.D., the S. Hurt Watts Professor of Surgery,
who became the eighty-second president of the American College of
Surgeons. Dr. Jones chaired the Department of Surgery from 1981
to 2001.
Support
for Our Intellectual Work
Another
indicator of the faculty's leadership and the quality of their intellectual
activity is the support their work receives from foundations and
other outside agencies. In 2001-2002, our faculty attracted $262
million in research grants, a University record. Furthermore, the
School of Medicine now ranks among the top thirty in the nation
in funding awarded by the National Institutes of Health. The diversity
of grants coming into the University highlights the broad strengths
of our faculty.
•
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the University Library a
three-year, $1 million grant to further research on the digital
library. The grant will enable the library's digital library research
and development group, in collaboration with colleagues at Cornell
University, to build a sophisticated digital repository system that
will provide streamlined access to the growing collections of electronic
texts, digital images, video and audio files, and social science
and geographic data sets. The Mellon Foundation also awarded the
library a $300,000 grant to build an American studies electronic
databank.
•
The Institute for Environmental Negotiation received a $375,000
grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to coordinate
the work of the national Community-Based Collaboratives Research
Consortium. The consortium serves as a forum for sharing research
findings and promoting a collaborative approach to environmental
management.
•
The University was a partner in a $1.8 million grant from Virginia's
Commonwealth Technology Research Fund to investigate how vaccines
and therapies for infectious and autoimmune diseases can be engineered
for delivery through plant consumption.
•
Thanks to a $379,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
Charlottesville will become the home of the South Atlantic Regional
Humanities Center, which is dedicated to preserving the distinct
historic and cultural character of the southeastern United States.
A collaboration of the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and
the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the center is one of
eight regional centers being established around the country by the
NEH.
•
The Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation has made a
four-year, $400,000 challenge grant to the Department of Environmental
Sciences to endow an educational outreach program on Virginia's
Eastern Shore. Income from the fund will be used to hire an educational
specialist to work as a liaison between the Northampton County schools
and the University scientists who conduct coastal research in the
department's Long-Term Ecological Research program.
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| Brooks
Pate |
he
annual awards conferred by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation are commonly referred to as the genius awards and
considering the list of recipients, rightly so.
MacArthur
Foundation Fellows have ranged from poet John Ashbery to physiologist
Jared Diamond to Marion Wright Edelman, president of the Children's
Defense Fund. In 2001 and 2002, two University faculty members,
chemist Brooks Pate and epidemiologist Janine Jagger, joined
their ranks. Each received a $500,000 unrestricted stipend
that is in effect an investment in their originality, insight,
and potential to bring about positive change. Mr. Pate is
at the forefront of what is called the "new chemistry."
A physical chemist, he uses a spectroscope to tease out the
basic reactive properties of molecules. Although spectroscopy
is a relatively mature methodology, Mr. Pate transcended technical
and conceptual hurdles previously thought insurmountable to
reveal new insights into chemical reactions of excited molecules.
At low-energy states, chemical reactions can be studied by
observing the interactions of electrons around relatively
stationary and insulated atomic nuclei. But at high-energy
states, the realm in which Mr. Pate works, it is the motion
of nuclei that plays an important, if not determinate, role
in the stability and shape of the resulting molecule.
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| Janine
Jagger |
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The
Becton Dickinson Professor of Health Care Worker Safety, Ms.
Jagger has raised worldwide awareness of the risk of blood-borne
diseases in the clinical workplace. She developed the Exposure
Prevention Information Network to track the occurrence of
needle sticks and similar incidents among workers in hospitals
and clinics, and she has promoted the redesign of syringes
and other sharp medical instruments to reduce exposure to
blood-borne pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis. In the 1980s,
she and her colleagues were awarded some of the first patents
for new safety needle devices. Ms. Jagger, who holds a doctorate
in epidemiology from the University, founded U.Va.'s International
Health Care Worker Safety Center in 1994.
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do buildings and urban spaces carry memory, and how is that
memory passed on from one generation to the next? Craig Evan
Barton is considering these and other questions as he studies
African-American communities around the country, especially
those that figured prominently in the struggle for civil rights.
