Awards, Honors, and Professorships

Chiu Named Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar
Albert Black Named UW's First Principal Lecturer
Other Awards, Honors, and Professorships

Chiu Named Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar

	Daniel Chiu. Photo by Mary Levin.

Daniel Chiu does research at the tiniest scales, but he hopes he can help unlock some of medical science’s biggest puzzles.

In July, Chiu, assistant professor in the UW Department of Chemistry, was named one of five recipients nationwide of $1 million research grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation’s Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research Program. The five-year award will support his work trying to decipher how the function of nerve synapses mimics that of a computer in the processes of learning and memory. The work could lead to greater understanding of, and thus possibly a treatment for, neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

“The synapse, based on our current understanding, is where learning and memory happens,” Chiu says.

The Chiu research group uses lasers to remove synaptic vesicles from neurons, the working cells of nerves, and analyze how they function in synaptic transmission, learning, and memory. Vesicles are minuscule pouches of liquid where chemical reactions take place that transfer information along a nerve’s path. Vesicles—essential in the chemical transfer of tiny information packets from one neuron to another—are just 50 nanometers across, about one-two-thousandth the width of a human hair.

The research primarily works with rat brains and cultures of brain cells. Chiu describes the work as basic research, looking at the individual makeup of vesicles one at a time, trying to find out more about what chemicals are being released during various nerve functions, and how they change over time and with activity.

“Once we understand the molecular details, then that will shed a lot of light on various neurological functions and dysfunctions,” he says.

Beyond doing cellular nanosurgery at such small scales, the Chiu group actually
is doing chemistry at the same level, in amounts of solution as small as one quadrillionth of a liter, called a femtoliter.

“We try to do chemistry at such a small scale because unless we can do that, we won’t be able to do what we want to do with the synaptic vesicles,” Chiu says. “That’s a very tiny amount of volume. That makes it challenging.”

Black Named UW's First Principal Lecturer

In his 32 years at the UW, Albert W. Black, Jr., has received a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Outstanding Public Service Award, and the Charles E. Odegaard Award from the Friends of the Educational Opportunity Program. Now he has been given a new title to recognize his award-winning teaching: principal lecturer. He is the first faculty member to receive this title. He also has been named the Wyckoff Faculty Fellow.

Al Black. Photo by Nancy Joseph.	.

Black’s primary affiliation has been with the UW Sociology Department. “He is the consummate teacher,” says Robert Crutchfield, professor and former chair of the department. “He teaches in the lecture halls, seminar rooms, in his writing, in his office, in public speeches, in the public schools, and on local radio. He made a conscious decision as a young scholar to focus his energies on teaching and serving not only here at the University, but in the broader community. His colleagues report that it is impossible to go anywhere in the Seattle metropolitan area with Al without encountering his students, who greet him warmly and appreciatively.”

Crutchfield adds that Black has made a habit of trying to teach his colleagues as well, in particular about the importance of undergraduate education. “Some of his messages weren’t always welcome,” says Crutchfield, “but many of the things he has argued for—the centrality of undergraduate education, broadening the diversity of our campus, rewarding innovative, creative teachers—are ideas that the campus has come to agree with.”

Funding for Black’s fellowship will come from the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Faculty Fellowship, designed to enhance the University’s ability to attract, retain, and provide opportunities for professional development for faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Other Awards, Honors, and Professorships

George Behlmer, professor of history, has been appointed to the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professorship in History.

Daniel Gamelin, assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded the 2003 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

David Hodge, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of geography, has received the 2003 Charles L. Hosler Alumni Scholar Medal from the Pennsylvania State University, which was established “to recognize the College’s most brilliant former students.”

Karsten Heeger, graduate student in physics, was awarded the prize for best dissertation—nationally—in nuclear physics this year by the American Physical Society.

Charles Hirschman, professor of sociology, is the new president-elect of the Population Association of America and will assume the presidency in 2005.

Debra Minkoff, associate professor of sociology, has received a Fulbright Fellowship as German Distinguished Chair in American Studies.

Becky Pettit, assistant professor of sociology, was appointed Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York for the 2003-2004 academic year.

The Department of Psychology’s Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program has received the “Outstanding Training Program” award from American Association of Behavior Therapy, the main national organization of scientifically oriented programs in this discipline.

Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and sociology, was the third most-cited mathematician for the decade 1993-2003 as reported by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Martin Savage, professor of physics, was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Ben Schmidt, associate professor of history, won the Hendricks Prize from the Holland Society in conjunction with the Friends of New Netherland, which identified his book Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 as the best of the year in colonial Dutch history.

Robin Chapman Stacey, associate professor of history, has been appointed Howard and Frances Keller Endowed Professor in History.

Joan Connelly Ullman, professor emeritus of history, was one of eight U.S. historians to receive recognition from the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, for lifetime “distinguished contributions to North American scholarship on Modern Iberia.”

Peter Ward, professor of earth and space sciences and biology, is the 2003 recipient of the Jim Shea Award, given annually by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers to promote “high-quality geoscience education.”

Robin K. Wright, Burke Museum curator and professor of art history, has received a Canadian Studies Senior Fellowship from the Canadian Embassy to research and write a book manuscript on the history of a set of Haida model houses and model totem poles created for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

[Autumn 2003 - Table of Contents]