Six win Faculty Excellence Awards

Six faculty members in four University colleges have been named winners of the Regents Awards for Faculty Excellence.

The recipients were chosen by a committee of the Faculty Senate president, the associate provost for faculty, and four faculty members.

William G. Buss

William G. Buss holds the O. K. Patton Chair in the College of Law. He joined the law faculty in 1967 after working for a Boston law firm and serving as a lecturer and administrator at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a nationally recognized scholar in constitutional law and education law. He received the UI Collegiate Teaching Award in 1998 and has been selected frequently by graduating law students to read their names or perform the hooding ceremony at graduation. Buss has been involved heavily in college governance activities. His University service includes membership on the Faculty Senate and Faculty Council, chairing a special committee to propose new procedural guidelines for promotion and tenure, serving on and presiding over the Faculty Judicial Commission, and advising the University president on recommendations of faculty judicial commission panels.

Martha Craft-Rosenberg

Martha Craft-Rosenberg, professor and chair of the parent, child, and family area of study in the College of Nursing, joined the faculty in 1980. Her academic contributions have helped to prepare the next generation of nurses who will care for children and families, and her scholarly reputation is international in scope. A recent doctoral student described her as "an excellent role model as a nursing scholar with an excitement for nursing research." Craft-Rosenberg has achieved prominence for her leadership in two areas: family/child nursing (with an emphasis on the siblings of ill children) and the structure of nursing knowledge (the taxonomy of nursing diagnosis, interventions, and outcomes). She was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the profession's highest honor, and three of the seven books she has edited have won "Book of the Year" awards from the American Journal of Nursing.

Robert Forsythe

Robert Forsythe, senior associate dean of the Tippie College of Business and the Leonard A. Hadley Chair in Leadership, joined the economics faculty in 1981. He was chair of the Department of Economics from 1990 to 1994. He served as president of the Economic Science Association from 1993 to 1995, and since 1997 he has been associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Economics. He is an accomplished researcher with an international reputation, particularly in the growing field of experimental finance and economics. The Journal of Economic Perspectives cited him in the Top 50 of the Dusansky-Vernon Profile of Individual Faculty Production, 1990-94. He is a cofounder and codirector of the Iowa Political Stock Market, which has evolved into the internationally acclaimed Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM). It has become so respected for its accuracy that more that 200 major media sources cited its findings during the 2000 presidential election.

Philip Kutzko

Philip Kutzko is a professor of mathematics and Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He joined the faculty in 1974 and is an internationally recognized leader in his field of research, number theory. He has been selected twice as a UI Faculty Scholar and has had continuous support for his research from the National Science Foundation for 30 years, a rare occurrence in mathematics. He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the École Normale Superiéure in Paris. He has been an invited speaker at an International Congress of Mathematicians, one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive. Kutzko is known as an outstanding teacher in all levels of courses, including the challenging large introductory lecture course for business students. He is particularly noted for his efforts to increase the number of minority students who get graduate degrees in mathematics at UI, an effort that has gained national attention.

Peter Rubenstein

Peter Rubenstein, professor of biochemistry, has excelled in teaching, research, and service during his 25 years at The University of Iowa. For the past 17 years, he has taught intermediary metabolism and its molecular regulation in the biochemistry course required of all first-year medical students. His commitment to and enthusiasm for the course are legendary. He explains detailed biochemical material in a way that integrates medically relevant metabolic issues with mechanisms of organic chemistry. Since 1995 he has served as codirector of the medical student curriculum. In his research laboratory, he and his research team study the properties of actin, a cytoskeletal protein involved in a variety of cellular functions and biochemical processes. His research has important implications for many human disease states. It has been funded continuously for many years by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and several private foundations.

David R. Soll

David R. Soll, Carver/Emil Witchi Professor of Biological Sciences, joined The University of Iowa in 1972. His research career, which has given rise to numerous publications and patents, is actually several careers in one. He is a pioneer and leader in the analysis of cell movement, developing computer-assisted methods for four-dimensional analysis of live cells. He has been the principal investigator of an National Institutes of Health-funded motility program project since 1982 and is director of the Keck Dynamic Image Analysis Facility. He also discovered "phenotypic switching" in the infectious fungi, a mechanism basic to fungal pathogenesis. This work, funded by NIH since 1978, has led to new insights into the molecular mechanisms and epidemiology of infection. Soll also developed new methods of treating hog-farm waste. He is director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Hybridoma Bank, which makes valuable antibody reagents available to researchers worldwide at a nominal fee. His teaching has been recognized for excellence at both undergraduate and graduate levels.