Faculty receive 2024-25 WARF Named Professorships, Kellett Fellowships, and Romnes Awards
Thirty-two UW–Madison faculty have been awarded fellowships from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research for 2024-25. The awardees span the four research divisions on campus: arts and humanities, physical sciences, social sciences and biological sciences.
“These awards recognize excellence in faculty research, academics, and outreach at various stages of their scholarly careers and provide an opportunity for continued development of their research programs,” says Cynthia Czajkowski, interim vice chancellor for research. “I look forward to seeing the results of their imaginative use of these funds.”
The awards are possible due to the research efforts of UW–Madison faculty and staff. Technology that arises from these efforts is licensed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the income from successful licenses is returned to the OVCR, where it’s used to fund research activities and awards throughout the divisions on campus.
WARF NAMED PROFESSORSHIPS
Eight faculty have been awarded WARF Named Professorships, which come with $100,000 and honor faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities. Award recipients choose the names associated with their professorships.
Pupa Gilbert, John D. Wiley Professor of Physics, studies biomineralization – the formation mechanisms, structure, chemistry, and materials properties of natural biominerals, such as coral skeletons, sea urchin spines, mollusk shell nacre, tooth enamel, and inner ear cochleae. Gilbert is working to save coral reefs from climate change and was knighted by Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Susan Hagness, Maria Stuchly Professor of Electrical Engineering, chairs the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Hagness also has served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs in the College of Engineering, is a faculty affiliate of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Imaging and Radiation Sciences program at the Carbone Cancer Center. Hagness’s research focuses on electromagnetic interactions with tissue for medical applications. She has recently expanded her work into electric-pulse delivery to enhance gene therapy.
David Kaplan, Richard L. Venezky Professor of Educational Psychology, studies Bayesian statistical methods with applications to large-scale national and international educational assessments. Kaplan was chair of the Department of Educational Psychology from 2012 to 2015, and received the Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the American Psychological Association. He was President of the Psychometric Society (2023-2024) and an International Guest Professor at the University of Heidelberg (2023).
Lisa L. Martin, Crawford Young Professor of Political Science, was Associate Dean in the Graduate School from 2016 to 2022. Her research is in international relations, with a focus on international institutions. Martin has made theoretical contributions to understanding how international and domestic institutions promote international cooperation, and to drawing out how institutions create issue linkages, enable credible commitments, and send costly signals, thereby improving the information environment in international politics. Her recent work has focused on challenges to the liberal international order, such as economic inequality and spread of disinformation, and how international organizations might respond to these challenges.
Dr. Perry J. Pickhardt, John R. Cameron Professor of Radiology and Medical Physics, is Chief of Gastrointestinal Imaging at the School of Medicine and Public Health. His work in abdominal imaging has resulted in over 500 scientific publications in the peer-reviewed literature. He has served as PI on multiple NIH RO1 grants and has authored over 100 book chapters and textbooks. His research interests have centered on computed tomography (CT), including colorectal cancer screening with CT colonography, artificial intelligence, and opportunistic CT screening. Dr. Pickhardt previously served in the U.S. Navy.
Pamela Potter, Michael Ochs Professor of German and Music, is a musicologist by training. Potter’s work spans German intellectual history, cultural history and historiography; identity politics; music in war; and the intersections of politics, demographics, and economics in musical life. She is the author of three monographs and co-editor of three essay collections. At the UW–Madison, she has served as director of the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, and the Center for European Studies.
Volker Radeloff, Margaret Murie Professor of Biodiversity Conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, studies how rapid land use and climate change affect biodiversity and wild places around the globe. He analyzes satellite images to map species’ habitats and biodiversity hotspots, monitor conservation threats, and plan conservation actions. His international research has taken him to places like the Caucasus, Mongolia, Patagonia, Tanzania, Thailand, Yakutia and Yunnan. His research has shown how the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered widespread agricultural abandonment allowing nature to come back, as well as many new protected areas, and rapid changes in wildlife populations. As a member of the Landsat and the MODIS/VIIRS Science Teams, he advises the USGS and NASA on future satellite missions.
Russ Shafer-Landau, Elliott Sober Professor of Philosophy, chaired the UW–Madison’s Philosophy department from 2010 to 2015. He was president of the American Philosophical Association in 2021-22. His area of specialization is metaethics—the area of moral philosophy that investigates the source of morality, its rational authority, and our ability to know right from wrong. His first book, Moral Realism (Oxford University Press, 2003), resuscitated the traditional idea that the fundamental principles of morality are robustly objective. Shafer-Landau has since written or co-authored five other books on moral philosophy. Shafer-Landau founded the journal Oxford Studies in Metaethics and is organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop, which brings more than 100 philosophers from around the world to the University of Wisconsin campus each fall.
H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship
Thirteen faculty have been honored with the H.I. Romnes Fellowships to recognize faculty with exceptional research contributions within their first six years from promotion to a tenured position. The award is named in recognition of the late WARF trustees president H.I. Romnes and comes with $60,000 that may be spent over five years.
Grant Armstrong, associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a faculty affiliate in the Language Sciences Program, studies comparative morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure). He has worked extensively on the analysis of grammatical variation across dialects of Spanish and on the documentation, description, and grammatical analysis of the Mayan language family, a group of around 30 indigenous languages spoken primarily in Belize, southern Mexico and Guatemala.
Emily Arthur, associate professor of art and printmaking and Book Art + Paper coordinator for the UW–Madison Art Department, works with scientists to elucidate the craft- and knowledge-based disciplines of art and science. Arthur served as a Visiting Fellow in Printing & Graphic Arts at Harvard University. Permanent collections include the Smithsonian American Art and Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Lauren Bishop is an associate professor in the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work and investigator at the Waisman Center. Her research focuses on empowering autistic adults to live long, healthy, and self-determined lives in their communities. She is studying disparities in health and wellbeing, as well as mechanisms underlying both healthy aging and early and accelerated aging in autistic adults.
Marguerite Burns, professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences, is a health services researcher studying the role that public health insurance plays in furthering the health and welfare of disadvantaged adults. A central focus of her current research is identifying the policies and interventions that facilitate a sustained return to the community following incarceration. Burns’ work has been supported through extramural grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Emily Callaci is a professor of history studying African History, global feminism and reproductive politics. She is author of a forthcoming book about the global Wages for Housework movement and is working on another book about reproductive politics in the era of African decolonization. She teaches classes on a range of subjects, including African Decolonization, Global Feminism and Creative Historical Writing. She is co-editor of the American Historical Review series “History Unclassified.”
Ilias Diakonikolas is a professor in the Department of Computer Sciences and is affiliated with the Department of Statistics, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, and the Data Science Institute. He studies the algorithmic foundations of massive data sets and works on designing efficient algorithms for fundamental problems in machine learning. He wrote with Daniel Kane the textbook Algorithmic High-dimensional Robust Statistics recently published by Cambridge University Press. He is a recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Marie Curie Fellowship, the best paper award at NeurIPS 2019, the IBM Research Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award, and an honorable mention in the George Nicholson competition from the INFORMS society.
Jennifer Dykema, associate professor of sociology and faculty director of the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, conducts research on topics related to survey methodology including questionnaire design, methods to increase response rates, and interviewer-respondent interaction. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics at UW–Madison and the University of Michigan.
Andy Garbacz, is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. His research focuses on mental health promotion; optimizing mental health interventions in school and community settings to center equity and justice; and improving adoption, implementation and sustainment. Garbacz emphasizes development, testing, and scaling for dissemination of family-centered and family-school partnership interventions to promote youth mental health.
Qunying Huang, associate professor of geography, leads the Spatial Computing and Data Mining Lab. Her research on GeoAI, big data analytics, and remote sensing and spatial networks addresses natural hazards, human mobility, and sustainable agriculture. She has authored over 100 articles and edited seven books. An enthusiastic instructor, her courses attract over 700 students annually. Huang serves as associate editor for the journal Geo-spatial Information Science and sits on the editorial boards of three international journals.
Dr. Dudley Lamming is an associate professor of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism; vice chair for biomedical research in the Department of Medicine; and director of the UW–Madison Comprehensive Diabetes Center Mouse Phenotyping and Surgery Core. Dr. Lamming is a fellow of the American Aging Association and of the Gerontological Society of America, and served as president of the American Aging Association from 2023 to 2024.
Lindsay Palmer, associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, studies global media from a qualitative perspective, especially focusing on two primary questions: 1) What challenges inform the labor of international news reporting and documentary production in the digital age, and 2) how do international news reports and documentaries represent cultural difference, particularly when addressing human rights violations? These questions have led Palmer to pursue research on digital war reporting, local translators and guides, and virtual reality news stories that focus on international human rights issues.
Dominic Parker is a professor of agricultural and applied economics, and has won teaching awards for courses in environmental and natural resource economics. His research appears in economics, science, and law journals, and includes studies of property rights and environmental markets, resource booms and busts, land use, fishery and wildlife regulations, water trading, and renewable energy. His work has been covered in over 100 media outlets including BBC News, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Economist.
Srivatsan Raman, associate professor of biochemistry, uses systems and synthetic biology to understand and engineer biomolecular and cellular systems at protein-wide and genome-wide scales. His research lies at the intersection of biochemistry, computation, and engineering. Raman has received the National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
KELLETT MID-CAREER AWARDS
Eleven faculty have been honored with Kellett Mid-Career Awards to support those promoted to tenured positions seven to 20 years ago and who have made key research contributions in their fields. The award, named for the late William R. Kellett, a former president of the WARF board of trustees and president of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, provides support and encouragement to faculty at a critical stage of their careers and comes with $75,000 to be spent over five years.
Andrew Alexander, professor of medical physics and psychiatry, and co-director of Waisman Brain Imaging Lab, develops and applies quantitative brain imaging methods using MRI. His research focuses on novel quantitative imaging techniques for characterizing brain tissue structure and microstructure. He has applied these technologies to a broad range of neurological conditions across the lifespan, with a specific focus on brain development and intellectual and developmental disorders.
Michael Arnold is a professor of materials science and engineering. Arnold’s research solves long-standing challenges in the synthesis, processing, growth, and assembly of carbon and related nanomaterials with impact on next generation microelectronics and energy applications. He teaches in laboratory and lecture settings at both undergraduate and graduate levels and currently serves as associate chair for undergraduate studies in materials science and engineering.
John Curtin, professor of psychology, combines personal sensing and machine learning algorithms for psychiatric screening, monitoring, and risk prediction. He embeds these algorithms within digital therapeutics to develop and deliver personalized and adaptive interventions for substance use and other psychiatric disorders. His scholarship has been recognized by numerous grants from the NIH and awards from the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.
Audrey Gasch is a professor of genetics in the Department of Medical Genetics. Her lab’s research studies fundamental principles in genotype, phenotype, and environment relationships, using budding yeast as a model to understand how different individuals respond to environmental stresses. She is also director of the UW–Madison Center for Genomic Science Innovation, an interdisciplinary center focused on genome-enabled research.
Laura Knoll, professor of medical microbiology and immunology, studies host-parasite interactions. Her lab explores how Toxoplasma gondii forms a chronic infection within the host and studies the mechanism for the species specificity of Toxoplasma sexual development in a feline host. Knoll is an editor for several journals as well as the chair for NIH study sections for F, K, and T32 awards. In 2022, she became associate dean for basic research training in the School of Medicine and Public Health.
Bo Liu, professor of cell and regenerative biology, has established a long-lasting, highly impactful basic/translational research program in vascular biology and disease. Liu is a dedicated mentor and has contributed significantly to the mission of the University by serving as director/co-director of various training programs for undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty.
Beth Nguyen, professor of English and director of the MFA program in creative writing, is a novelist and nonfiction author. Nguyen received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, which will support her series of non-fiction stories about natural disasters and their effects. In 2023, she published Owner of a Lonely Heart, a memoir of her life as a young Vietnamese refugee who migrated to the United States and didn’t meet her mother until she was 19. Nguyen is also the author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and two fictional works: Short Girls, which won a 2010 American Book Award, and Pioneer Girl.
Shanan Peters, professor of geoscience, studies the long-term coevolution of life and Earth’s surface environment. He combines new quantitative estimates of the mass and material properties of rocks in the Earth’s crust with biological and geochemical proxy records to better understand the integrated Earth system. He created the publicly accessible database Macrostrat and its widely-used mobile application Rockd, and played a leading role in establishing xDD, hosted in the Center for High Throughput Computing, as a campus-wide resource for literature-based data discovery and research.
Christine Schwartz, professor of sociology, studies social demography, family, and stratification. Much of her research focuses on the link between demographic change and social inequality. Her current research examines the relationship between changes in union formation and dissolution, assortative mating, and income inequality in the United States. She also studies the consequences of the reversal of the gender gap in education for marriage patterns and outcomes. Schwartz is an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and the Institute for Research on Poverty. Her work has appeared in leading journals including the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Gender & Society.
Tehshik Yoon, professor of chemistry, studies the interaction between light and matter. Specifically, he has been developing catalysts that can control the outcomes of light-induced chemical reactions with atomic precision over the structures of the products. He received the Kiekhofer Teaching Award in recognition of his commitment to undergraduate education.
Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu, professor of computer science, works on safeguarding Artificial Intelligence from running amok. His group conducts basic research in machine learning, specifically semi-supervised learning, adversarial machine learning, reinforcement learning, and game theory. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and served on the DARPA ISAT advisory group.
By Natasha Kassulke, natasha.kassulke@wisc.edu