Sixteen will receive research awards




Updated 1:00 PM April 14, 2003
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Sixteen will receive research awards

By Judy Steeh
News Service

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded ADVANCE program, in cooperation with the president's and provost's offices, has made 13 Elizabeth Caroline Crosby Research Awards and three Lydia Adams DeWitt Research awards to women faculty in science and engineering at U-M. The awards were announced by Abigail Stewart of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, one of the principal investigators on the NSF grant.

"The Crosby awards were begun last year, as part of our mission to increase the participation and advancement of women faculty on the tenure track in science and engineering at the U-M," Stewart said. The DeWitt awards were added this year to extend the same opportunities to women faculty on the primary research scientist track.

Stewart explained that the proposals were judged on two criteria: the quality and significance of the scholarly activity itself and, equally important, its value in enhancing women's participation and advancement in science and engineering at the University.

"This year's selection process was highly competitive. We received many excellent proposals. We were able to make as many awards as we did because so many people requested only partial funding, which enabled us to make the funds go further," she said.

The Crosby award winners are:

Rebecca Bernstein, Department of Astronomy, to fund interpretation of a unique dataset designed to address the question of how galaxies evolve in dense environments.

Katarina Borer, Department of Movement Science in Kinesiology, to help support two promising studies on the use of exercise and diet for appetite suppression in postmenopausal women.

Robyn Burnham, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Museum of Paleontology, for field research and plant collection in three South American countries and for laboratory work to analyze the collections.

Amy Cohn, Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, to present research results on network design problems in areas such as transportation, logistics and telecommunications.

Rachel Goldman, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, to illuminate the effect of hydrogen on the properties of narrow-gap nitride semiconductor alloys that hold promise for a wide variety of optoelectronic applications.

Ingrid Hendy, Department of Geological Sciences, to fund the acquisition of sample core material, to examine low oxygen sediments in a series of deep ocean sediment cores.

Trachette Jackson, Department of Mathematics, to extend a mathematical model of tumor encapsulation to include certain effects of the interaction among tumor cells, the extracellular matrix and interstitial fluid.

Smadar Karni, Department of Mathematics, to fund a speaker series and two one-day symposia at the U-M, featuring women in applied and interdisciplinary mathematics.

Elizaveta Levina, Department of Statistics, for research in pattern recognition and texture analysis.

Mingyan Liu, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, to conduct a study of object searching, using multiple sensors with energy constraints, in a large wireless sensor network.

Laura Olsen, Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, to characterize molecular and ultrastructural events associated with the onset of autophagy in plants in response to nutrient starvation or stress conditions.

Rosemary Rochford, Department of Epidemiology, to fund preliminary data collection at the Kenyan Medical Research Institute.

Michelle Swanson, Department of Microbiology & Immunology, for laboratory supplies to be used in a study of how Legionella pneumophila replicates within white blood cells of the human lung.

The DeWitt award winners are:

Catherine Badgley, Museum of Paleontology, to purchase equipment and supplies for utilizing a new method of gathering data about microscopic wear on mammal teeth.

Cynthia Marcelo, Department of Surgery, to investigate the action of fatty acid lipids on epidermal cell function.

Susan Shore, Kresge Hearing Research Institute, to fund the purchase of signal generation and data acquisition equipment to perform electrophysiological experiments for research on tinnitus.

The awards are funded by a five-year, $3.7 million grant from NSF, which was given to U-M to develop strategies that will improve opportunities for tenure-track women faculty in scientific and engineering fields. Additional funding was provided by the president's and provost's offices.

The Crosby Research Awards are named for world-renowned neuroanatomist Elizabeth Caroline Crosby (1888-1983), who was the first woman full professor of the U-M Medical School and the first woman to be awarded the Henry Russel Lectureship. She received the Henry Gray Award in Neuroanatomy in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1979. Although she retired in 1958, she served as a clinical consultant at U-M and at the University of Alabama, and remained active in scientific work until the end of her life.

The DeWitt Research Awards commemorate Lydia Adams DeWitt (1859-1928), a pathologist and research scientist known for her pioneering work in the chemotherapy of tuberculosis. She earned M.D. and B.S. degrees from U-M, and she taught and did research here for some 11 years following graduation. When she was rejected by U-M's all-male Faculty Research Club, she organized the Women's Research Club, serving for a time as its president.

Sixteen will receive research awards

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