Recipient Bios: University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence Awards Academic Year 2007-08

Cynthia M. Anderson, Associate Professor of School Psychology
Cynthia Anderson is widely considered one of the top young scholars in the fields of applied behavior analysis and positive behavior support in schools. Her scholarship focuses on effective, efficient, and practical ways that schools can implement system-wide discipline programs to foster learning among all students while at the same time addressing the needs of those students who require accommodations or special support. Anderson is the co-director of the UO School Psychology program in the College of Education.

Bruce A. Bowerman, Professor of Biology
Bruce Bowerman’s research on the mechanisms that govern the development of a single cell into a multicellular organism is considered some of the best work performed in this field. His papers have been published in the best journals in the field, including Nature and Science, and he is a much sought-after speaker at national and international conferences. At the same time, he is an excellent teacher who has developed and taught courses across the entire spectrum of the biology department’s offerings, from the 100-level to specialized graduate courses. Bowerman also serves as Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology.

Jeffrey A. Cina, Professor of Chemistry
Jeffrey Cina is an innovator in the theoretical, quantum mechanical analysis of fast chemical processes (“wavepacket interferometry”). With an excellent record of publication in theoretical physical chemistry research on dynamical processes in molecules, Cina was honored with a Guggenheim award in 2003. He is consistently identified as one of the top teachers in the department of chemistry. Cina has served as director of the Oregon Center for Optics.

John R. Halliwill, Associate Professor of Human Physiology
John R. Halliwell investigates how the human cardiovascular and respiratory systems adapt and respond to exercise and other stresses encountered during everyday life. This research has two major focus areas: why blood pressure is lower after exercise (a phenomenon known as postexercise hypotension), and what hormonal, neural, or metabolic factors are responsible for changes in blood flow in various regions of the body during exposure to environmental and physical stresses, such as altitude (hypoxic stress) or changes in body position (gravitational stress). Both of these focus areas are related to issues of human health and disease. He co-directs the Exercise and Environmental Physiology Labs. His receipt of a National Young Investigator Award for Environmental and Exercise Physiology given by the American Physiological Society underscores the high quality of his work.

Renee A. Irvin, Associate Professor of Planning, Public Policy and Management
Renee Irvin’s research specialization is in the area of economics of not-for-profit enterprise, wealth, and philanthropy as well as regulation and management of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. She directs the Graduate Certificate in Not-for-Profit Management. Irvin was awarded “Outstanding Teacher of the Year” in 2003 by the department of planning, public policy and management undergraduate and graduate students. In 2005, she developed a program, funded by Pacific Continental Bank, that enables students to gain valuable experience on boards and with nonprofit organizations.

Lauren J. Kessler, Professor of Journalism and Communication
Lauren Kessler is nationally known and respected in both the academic and professional writing communities. She is the author of a leading textbook on grammar and is the creator and director of the only creative nonfiction program located in a journalism school in the country. She is the author of 11 books, including five works of narrative nonfiction. Her most recent book, "Dancing with Rose," was published in 2007 to strong reviews. "When Words Collide," a grammar and style guide for media writers co-authored with Duncan McDonald, is now in its seventh edition and is a standard reference work for professional writers and journalism students.

John T. Lysaker, Associate Professor of Philosophy
John Lysaker is an outstanding scholar whose work ranges across several subfields of philosophy, including aesthetics, social and political philosophy, philosophical psychology, and both Continental and American philosophy. His second book, "Emerson and Self-Culture," will be released in February 2008. His third book, "Schizophrenia and the Fate of Self," co-authored with a clinical psychologist is under contract with Oxford University Press. Lysaker is an outstanding teacher offering courses on many of the most influential thinkers of Europe and America: Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Adorno, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Emerson, the classical pragmatists and contemporary thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty. He is completing a three-year term on the executive committee of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and has served on a number of other committees in the American Philosophical Association and the Society for the Study of Existentialism and Phenomenology.

Ronald B. Mitchell, Professor of Political Science
Ronald Mitchell is an accomplished political scientist who specializes in international relations and environmental politics. His current research is supported by two National Science Foundation grants – “Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Relationships and Early-Career Development to Advance Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Change and Impacts” and “Analysis of the Effects of Environmental Treaties.”  He has published two books and numerous articles on environmental politics and treaty compliance. Mitchell is a core faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program and is very active in national and international advisory boards and scientific committees.

Madonna L. Moss, Professor of Anthropology
Madonna Moss has established an international profile based on her expertise in Northwest Coast archaeology encompassing First Nations of Canada and the U.S. In addition to standard archaeological methods, she brings expertise in zooarchaeological, cultural resource management and ethnohistorical methods to her research and develops projects that address the needs of local Native communities, such as her current work on a 4000-year-old Tlingit village. In addition, her work on marine mammals and seabirds has relevance to biologists and wildlife managers because of its significance for understanding long-term trends in wildlife abundance and behavior, and the sustainability of resource use. Moss has won the Thomas F. Herman Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Stephen W. Owen, Professor of Music
Stephen Owen is a nationally known composer, arranger, soloist, clinician and educator. His compositions are performed nationally and have received performances at the International Association of Jazz Educators Conference each year since 1986. Owen is a highly respected educator and a 1991 recipient of the Ersted Award, the University of Oregon's top faculty award for distinguished teaching. Owen has conducted all-state and regional honor groups in eight states and he has given solo performances across the nation establishing him as a national leader in jazz education.

Craig Parsons, Associate Professor of Political Science
Craig Parsons works in the general area of comparative politics with particular focus on in the ideas and institutions that have come together to construct today's Europe. His first book, "A Certain Idea of Europe" (Cornell University Press, 2003), focused on the political principles that won out in the construction of the European Union. He has also been involved in projects on European Union politics, immigration in Europe, and “constructivist” political economy. His current research looks further back in history to trace ideas about democracy in Britain, France, and Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Daniel B. Rosenberg, Associate Professor of History in the Robert D. Clark Honors College
An intellectual and cultural historian, Daniel Rosenberg focuses on problems of time and representation in eighteenth-century Europe. He has written extensively on the legacies of the Enlightenment in nineteenth and twentieth-century art, philosophy, and literature. His current project on the history of the timeline is titled The Graphic Invention of Modern Time. He spent 2006-07 as a visiting fellow in the Princeton University Council of the Humanities. Rosenberg is an exemplary teacher and is a member of the American Historical Association, Modern Language Association, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Western Society for French History and the Portland Center for Cultural Studies.

Marc Schlossberg, Associate Professor of Planning, Public Policy and Management
Marc Schlossberg has been a pioneer in fostering interdisciplinary projects that integrate sustainability, city design and social change. For the last two years he has led the UO’s involvement in a four campus, five-year, $30 million national transportation research center called OTREC – the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium. He has secured two UO Williams Council grants to build interdisciplinary campus capacity for students to engage in community-based service learning and mapping work. Schlossberg was selected as one of 25 NextGen Scholars of Sustainable Transport in Europe and Links and Liaisons.

Andrew Schulz specializes in 18th- and 19th-century European art, the art of Spain from El Greco to Picasso, and the history of printmaking. Much of his published work has focused on Francisco Goya (1746-1828), culminating with a book-length study on Goya’s seminal print series, Los Caprichos. His continuing research on Goya addresses the artist’s legacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, Schulz is currently investigating the use of visual culture to construct Spanish imperial and national identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Qi-Man Shao, Professor of Mathematics
Qi-Man Shao works in the area of probability and statistics. He has published more than 130 scholarly articles on a variety of complex topics in probability and statistics including self-normalized limit theory, Monte Carlo studies, bootstrap, general M-estimate, normal approximation, strong approximation, small deviation and Gaussian processes. He also is an editor of several key statistics journals including The Annals of Statistics.

Stephen J. Shoemaker, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Stephen Shoemaker is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar of Early Christian Studies. Shoemaker’s primary interests lie in the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, and more specifically in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity. His research focuses on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and the relations between Near Eastern Christianity and formative Islam. In 2006 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship in Byzantine Studies.

Joseph W. Thornton, Associate Professor of Biology
Joseph Thornton is internationally recognized for his work in evolutionary biology. Employing a synthesis of evolutionary and phylogenetic techniques with functional molecular biology, he seeks to understand the evolutionary dynamics that have determined how genes and the proteins they code for got their highly specialized and well-optimized functions. He is one of this year’s recipients of the White House Presidential Awards for Early Career Scientists and Engineers, marking him as one of the very best young scientists in the country. Thornton is highly respected also for the contributions he makes to teaching, in part through his commitment to how scientific knowledge can be used to support policies that protect both natural systems and democratic principles.

Robert L. Tsai, Associate Professor of Law
Robert Tsai is a constitutional law scholar. He is finishing a book on the First Amendment titled "Eloquence and Reason: Cultivating Freedom of Expression" (Yale University Press, forthcoming October 2008). He is also working on a project that investigates presidential strategies on rights and theorizes the social conditions under which executive endorsement of rights is plausible. Tsai is known as a challenging and superb teacher, and in 2007 the law faculty presented him with the Orlando J. Hollis Teaching Award, the law school’s highest teaching honor.