University Times

Winners of the 2009 chancellor’s awards for distinguished teaching and distinguished research have been announced.

Distinguished teaching award winners are:

• Jennifer Cartier, assistant professor, Department of Instruction and Learning, School of Education.

• Chuck Kinder, professor of English and director of the writing program.

• Michael J. Madison, professor and associate dean for research, School of Law.

• Marla Ripoll, associate professor, Department of Economics.

• Mark S. Roberts, professor, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine.

Distinguished research award winners in the senior scholar category, which recognizes “an outstanding and continuing record of research and scholarly activity,” are:

• Jennifer R. Grandis, UPMC Endowed Chair in Head and Neck Cancer Surgical Research; vice chair for research, Department of Otolaryngology, and professor of otolaryngology and pharmacology, School of Medicine.

• Angela M. Gronenborn, UPMC Rosalind Franklin Professor and chair, Department of Structural Biology, School of Medicine.

• Thomas L. Saaty, professor of business administration and University Professor, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business.

Distinguished research award winners in the junior scholar category, that is, a scholar “whose exceptional early contributions have demonstrated great potential and have already produced a measure of international standing,” are:

• Judith Klein-Seetharaman, assistant professor, Department of Structural Biology, School of Medicine.

• Kazunori Koide, professor, Department of Chemistry.

Each faculty honoree will receive a $2,000 cash prize. In addition, each teaching honoree will receive a $3,000 grant, administered by the home department, to support his or her teaching, and each research award winner will receive a $3,000 grant to support his or her research.

Winners of the 2009 teaching, research and public service awards — as well as other distinguished faculty, staff, alumni and students — will be recognized Feb. 27 during Pitt’s 33rd annual honors convocation. Winners’ names also will be inscribed on plaques displayed in the William Pitt Union.

(Winners of the 2009 chancellor’s award for distinguished public service were announced previously. See Feb. 5 University Times.)

Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award

A selection committee, chaired by Patricia Beeson, vice provost for graduate studies and undergraduate studies, recommended the winners after reviewing supporting materials. Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg sent congratulatory letters to the winners, citing some of their accomplishments derived from information and letters of recommendation supporting the winners’ nominations.

“The very existence of this award underscores the high institutional priority that we assign to our teaching responsibilities, and your individual efforts stand as an inspiring example of excellence in the role of University teacher,” Nordenberg wrote to the teaching award winners.

The education school’s Jennifer Cartier was recognized by Nordenberg for her commitment to science education. “You have demonstrated the remarkable ability to teach a broad range of students in a variety of situations, including high school students, pre-service elementary teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, and in-service training for current science teachers,” Nordenberg wrote.

The quality of Cartier’s teaching effectiveness is reflected in the consistently high marks on her teaching evaluations; the number of grants she has been awarded attest to her being at the forefront of her field, he noted.

“You have designed courses that actively engage students with both science content and scientific inquiry processes, and allow students to apply these ideas to authentic educational situations,” the chancellor continued. “Your assignments are creative and provide students opportunities to stretch their thinking and look for real-life situations.”

According to her web site, Cartier’s career path initially looked like it would take her into research. In college, she participated in a number of intensive research projects in the fields of molecular genetics and biochemistry. Her college thesis involved active-site mapping of the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase protein. Following college, Cartier earned a biochemistry master’s degree based on her work in virology.

But as the daughter, wife and sister of teachers, she said it was inevitable that her love of science eventually would be channeled into a career in education. In 1994, she entered graduate studies in science education. Since then, she has been working primarily in the areas of curriculum development and teacher professional development in science education.

Her other duties at the School of Education include providing leadership in the development of new science teacher preparation programs; developing policies to support re-conceptualized doctoral programs in science education; developing assessment tools and protocols for science program field supervisors, and advising graduate students.

Chuck Kinder was recognized by the chancellor for his 28 years of teaching in the Department of English and his commitment as the director of the writing program.

“The number and names of the students whose writing you have helped to shape is legendary,” Nordenberg wrote. “Many of your former students singularly credit you for their becoming writers. The fact that you are sought after to lecture and conduct workshops and seminars on the craft of fiction writing throughout the country and overseas is a testament to the high esteem others in your field have for your talents. The University is proud to reward your many contributions to excellence in teaching with this award. On behalf of the many students who have benefited from their interactions with you, let me express deep gratitude for your dedication and hard work. ”

Kinder received both a BA and MA in English and creative writing from West Virginia University, followed by two years of graduate study at Stanford University as an Edith Mirrillee Writing Fellow. He was appointed to a three-year position as a Jones lecturer in fiction at Stanford. He has been a writer-in-residence at the University of California-Davis and the University of Alabama. He has lectured at Casa delle Letterature and the Universita La Sopienze in Rome, and the Scuola Holden in Turino, Italy.

Kinder’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Award in Fiction and an Appalachian Heritage Denny C. Plattner First Place Award for Nonfiction.

Kinder told the University Times he had a “checkered past,” which led him into teaching. “I stumbled along and eventually stumbled into teaching. I took the path of least resistance. I was working in San Francisco and I applied for the job at Pitt so I could be close to my aging relatives in West Virginia to collect their stories before they died off. Now I’ve been here about 87 years,” he quipped.

He credits the influence of a Victorian Age specialist professor at West Virginia University as a model for teaching. “People would be surprised to know that I’m an expert on Matthew Arnold, and it’s all because of John Stasny’s teaching.”

As for his teaching philosophy, Kinder said, “To do as little harm as I possibly can, while encouraging writers to get their creative juices popping and boiling. I try to get them to trust the ‘accidents’ behind the story. The perfect story includes a surprise, that magic moment when the narrative takes on a life of its own to not only the reader’s surprise, but to the author’s. I try to get students to trust that.”

Kinder said he was honored and thrilled to win the chancellor’s award. “Of course, it means I had to rent one of those robes and a hat to attend the honors convocation,” he joked.

Law professor and associate dean Michael Madison was honored by the chancellor for his commitment to training students to think and act like lawyers.

“Your individual efforts stand as an inspiring example of excellence in the role of University teacher,” Nordenberg wrote. “You have taught a range of courses, and in each you have taken the approach best suited to the subject matter and the educational goals of your students. You require students to be active learners by placing them in the specific legal practice being studied, which allows them to learn the nuances of legal culture. You incorporate your scholarship into your teaching, asking students to work on problems that are at the cutting edge of your field.”

Despite the significant additional work involved, the chancellor continued, “you have employed non-traditional forms of assessment such as written memoranda that provide students with a realistic, feedback-driven experience of what lawyers actually do and give students the opportunity to learn from those experiences.”

Madison also has shared his method of formative feedback with colleagues and thus stimulated their thinking about how they might improve their teaching, Nordenberg noted.

Madison told the University Times, “I’m not an exuberant, demonstrative person, so I savored a brief moment for myself when I learned I’d won this award. It was an awfully nice way to begin the week. I called my wife, got in touch with my kids and a couple of very close friends and with the dean of the law school. Then I went to class.”

Madison said he came to his academic career belatedly. “I went to law school for the wrong reason — really, for no reason — then wandered the fields of law firm practice for many years before realizing that I really should be a scholar. To be a scholar, of course, you have to be a teacher. I taught my first law school class in 1997, and I remember coming out of the classroom at the end of the hour and thinking that this is a hell of a lot of fun. Maybe I was born to be a professor, but it took me many, many years to figure that out.”

Madison writes and teaches about information law and theory. His classroom subjects include various disciplines of intellectual property law, contracts and commercial law and the law of “cyberspace,” including legal issues involving new technologies and media.

“I’ve done a pretty good job of teaching using the theoretical models that I work with in my scholarship, so those two halves of professional life reinforce one another effectively,” Madison said. “The idea that knowledge is linked to discipline and practice is one of the core ideas that animates copyright, patent and trademark law.”

He said he focuses his teaching efforts on helping students learn how to be good attorneys, efforts that vary depending on whether the class is large or a small seminar, first-year or upper-level.

“The common thread is that the course is never only about the law. The course is about using the law and using other knowledge and other skills,” he said. “And when I grade their work, I’m pretty direct and sometimes pretty harsh. Students often don’t like all the criticism. It’s better to get stinging criticism and a low grade from me than biting criticism and a termination notice from an employer.”

The approach pays off in the end, Madison said. “Once they graduate and start working, my students tell me that my courses are fantastic preparation for the life of a practicing lawyer. My satisfaction comes from satisfied and successful alumni.”  

Economics professor Marla Ripoll was honored by Nordenberg for engaging students in the study of economics by helping them understand how social scientists interpret the world around them.

“You create and use concrete models such as ‘the Pittsburgh-map model’ to help students frame their understanding of abstract concepts,” Nordenberg wrote. “You have a carefully structured series of writing assignments that are linked to lectures and class exercises, providing students with both feedback and practice so that they can develop their research skills. You have shared these successful practices with colleagues by presenting in one of the Summer Instructional Development Institute workshops. Your outstanding record of teaching accomplishment adds to the distinction of the University of Pittsburgh.”

Ripoll, who teaches both undergraduate and graduate classes, said she was drawn to teaching at an early age. “I’ve always liked to explain things and I like the human contact of the classroom,” she said. “I think you have to be the model of a curious human being. If you’re not curious, the students won’t be either.”

Ripoll also is a core faculty member at the Center for Latin American Studies and the global studies program in the University Center for International Studies (UCIS). She is a member of the UCIS advisory committee and teaches in the Latin American studies certificate program.

Herself a native of Colombia, Ripoll said, “International students are quite interested in the topics I teach. When I ask them to write a paper on an particular country, many of them have traveled to those countries. Those students also add a lot to the classes from their experiences.”

In 2004, Ripoll won a Tina and David Bellet Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Award. She also serves on the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence.

“Winning the chancellor’s award was an unexpected surprise. I know it’s a hard award to get,” Ripoll told the University Times. “Whether I won the award or not, I did find that I enjoyed writing my dossier because it caused me to reflect on what I’m doing now regarding teaching. After winning the Bellet, I looked again at my research focus, which at that time had been on developing countries, poor countries. I started re-formulating topics in my Topics in Economic Growth and Development classes to reflect my new research. My Introduction to Development Economics sometimes is a lecture course and sometimes a writing course, and I have to adjust to that as well.”

Medical school professor Mark Roberts also holds appointments in the Graduate School of Public Health and the School of Engineering.

He is director of degree-granting programs at the Institute for Clinical Research Education, and chief of the section of decision sciences and clinical systems modeling in the Division of General Internal Medicine.

“I am fundamentally one of the more multi-disciplinary people I know. In over 20 years in my own research I’ve tackled management science, decision science, economics and currently I’m doing research on health care to make it more efficient,” Roberts told the University Times.

Outside the University, he serves as president of the Society for Medical Decision Making, an organization of more than 1,000 members that is dedicated to improving outcomes in health care through systematic approaches to clinical decision-making and policy formation.

Roberts was honored by the chancellor as “an inspiring example of excellence in the role of University teacher. Your ability to motivate your students is noteworthy, as is your dedication to advising master’s and PhD-level students in clinical research and in industrial engineering. The clinical research courses that you have developed and continue to teach serve to strengthen the degree-granting programs within the Institute for Clinical Research Education. Your efforts do honor to the title of ‘teacher.’ The University is proud to reward your many contributions by granting you its highest teaching award.”

“I was really pleased to win this award, but I think this is really an award for our program. There are so many great people and in particular, great students. That combination helped,” Roberts said.

He maintained that teaching was in his blood, as both his father and brother became university professors. “I’ve been teaching as long as I can remember, going back to my undergraduate days as a TA,” Roberts said. “I believe that to really understand something you have to be able to teach it, and the understanding is far deeper when you can teach it. My personal view is that there are ways to help teachers improve, but there’s something about the personality of a good teacher that is inborn.”

The wide-ranging interests of his students, Roberts said, makes teaching all the more enjoyable.

“It’s always good to get people from different disciplines in the same room. When I teach clinical and research methodology there are common attributes, because I’m teaching what they’re going to be doing for the rest of their lives regardless of discipline. Naturally, there’s a built-in interest there for students and junior investigators who are learning clinical research techniques. They’re motivated because this will be their life’s work.”

Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award

A selection committee, chaired by George Klinzing, vice provost for research, recommended the winners after reviewing supporting materials.

Senior scholar Jennifer Grandis has received wide scientific acclaim and support for her work, Nordenberg noted in his letter to Grandis.

“Your remarkable contributions to cancer research have been recognized by the recent awarding of the prestigious American Cancer Society Clinical Professorship for 2008-2013,” Nordenberg wrote. “You have been the first individual at the University of Pittsburgh to achieve this award and are the only woman surgeon to have been so honored. Through your academic leadership and accomplishments in cancer research, you have brought remarkable recognition to the University of Pittsburgh.”

A report in the journal Nature in 2008 showed that Grandis ranked 11th overall nationally in National Institutes of Health funding, the chancellor added.

A study led by Grandis was the first to show that the expression of a protein called STAT1 may play a vital role in preventing head and neck tumor growth. STAT1 belongs to a family of proteins called signal transducers and activators of transcription that have been linked to tumor progression in many cancers.

“Your research has contributed greatly to the development of new targeted therapies for patients with head and neck cancer,” Nordenberg wrote. “You were among the first to report the biological basis of enhanced growth of these tumors, and new effective drugs have been developed based upon the inhibition of this cancer growth mechanism.”

Grandis told the University Times, “I was stunned and pleased when I learned I’d won this award. I wasn’t expecting it. It’s a big University and in the medical school there is a lot of great research going on.”

Grandis said she gravitated toward research because of the devastating effects that cancer has on patients.

“I went to medical school to take care of patients,” she said. “I was inspired to go into research when I realized during my clinical experience that head and neck cancers were particular cancers for which patients pay a high price: They sometimes become dysfunctional, have trouble swallowing, have difficulty with speaking language and very often they are not cured. So I realized we needed to understand the biology behind these cancers and that’s what my research has been after.”

The medical school’s Angela Gronenborn is a structural biologist whose research is aimed at uncovering the structural basis of cellular interactions.

“You are a pioneer in the elucidation of protein structure, and have spearheaded the application of nuclear magnetic resonance to determine the three-dimensional structures of large proteins and protein complexes in solution,” Nordenberg wrote. “Recently, you have applied these approaches to the study of HIV, how its gene regulation program gives rise to its pathogenesis and how rational interventions could lead to control of HIV infections. The investigative methods that you developed to further your research are now used in academic and industrial laboratories throughout the world — and have been used by other scientists to conduct ground-breaking research.”

Nordenberg noted that Gronenborn has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles, organized numerous international conferences and been recognized as a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London and a fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance. In 2007, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

“You have achieved national and international eminence as an outstanding scholar in your field,” the chancellor wrote.

Senior scholar Gronenborn expressed gratitude to colleagues and friends who nominated and supported her for this award. “It is an honor and a privilege to be recognized ‘at home,’” she said. “Whatever I may have accomplished over the years is as much the result of efforts by the people with whom I have worked as my own. I am fortunate to have spent my past and present with some of the most dedicated, hardworking, interesting and smart people engaged in scientific research, and people in my group as well as my scientific collaborators and peers provide the lifeblood for my work.”

While she works with nuclear magnetic resonance and other sophisticated equipment, Gronenborn said, “Science is advanced by people, through their intellectual creativity, curiosity, wisdom, experience and talent. It may be difficult to accurately quantify these human qualities and their impact on me as a person [but] I have been fortunate to have worked in institutions and with people who cherish risk and imagination. Nobody ever stopped me from trying out new ideas, even if they sounded crazy. I am grateful that the University of Pittsburgh allows me to continue on this path.”

Senior scholar Thomas Saaty of the Katz school is best known as the inventor and architect of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multi-party multi-criteria decision analysis that he later generalized in the form of the analytic network process (ANP).

Nordenberg wrote to Saaty, “You are considered by your peers to be one of the most distinguished contributors to operations research and the general field of decision-making. As you know, the ANP has been applied to a variety of decisions involving benefits, costs, opportunities and risks and is particularly useful in predicting outcomes.”
Saaty has published more than a dozen books on AHP and ANP. His nontechnical book on AHP, “Decision Making for Leaders,” has been translated into more than 10 languages. Currently, he is involved in extending his mathematical multi-criteria decision-making theory to how to synthesize group and societal influences. He also is developing the Super Decisions software that implements ANP.

The chancellor noted that Saaty has been recognized as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been elected a member of the International Academy of Management and the National Academy of Engineering. He has been awarded the Gold Medal from the International Society of Multicriteria Decision Making as well as a 2008 Impact Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences for the development of AHP.

Saaty also is a member of the board of advisers to Decision Lens, a company based on his analytic hierarchy process and analytic network process.

“My research career started quite differently than most academicians,” Saaty told the University Times. “I studied mathematics in college in the 1950s when operations research as it is applied to people was a new field and I got interested in pursuing that application.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, Saaty worked for a number of U.S. government agencies and companies doing government-sponsored research. His employers included the Operations Evaluation Group at the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the U.S. State Department during the Kennedy administration. “I was able to observe game-theorists and economists and others try to negotiate, and I got insights into the process,” which greatly informed his research, he said. “I’m just grateful in my life to work with such good people.”

Prior to coming to Pitt, Saaty was a professor at Penn’s Wharton School, 1969-79, where he first brought his decision-making frameworks to the classroom.

“I’m 82 years old and I’m not so taken with awards any more — not that I don’t appreciate this award. I’ve been developing ideas over so many years, so it’s more that it’s all in a day’s work,” Saaty said.

Junior scholar Judith Klein-Seetharaman was praised by Nordenberg as “a world leader in rhodopsin research, [who] has played an integral role in the development of the field, along with contributing significantly to the challenging problem of protein folding.”

Rhodopsin is a pigment of the retina that is responsible for the formation of photo-receptor cells and the first events in the perception of light.

“You have an unusual gift for doing both theory and experimental work in your research,” the chancellor wrote. “You have chosen exciting research problems such as the exploring of NMR studies for complex membrane proteins. It is remarkable that you have managed to integrate work in disparate areas of research at multiple institutions with creativity, enthusiasm, scientific depth and broadness. Your productivity has been stellar.”

Klein-Seetharaman has served as a speaker or session chair at numerous retinal conferences and has received speaking invitations from around the world, including Germany, Japan and Spain. She has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Career Award, the Sofya Kovalevskaya Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society, which is given to “a woman who holds very high promise of achieving prominence while developing the early stages of a career.”

Klein-Seetharaman also received a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Award for her proposal titled “Identification of New Drug Targets by Linking HIV Function to Protein Interaction Pathways.”

Klein-Seetharaman told the University Times, “I was very happy to win this award. It was quite unexpected. I was traveling and one of my students got in touch with me to say I had a letter from the chancellor. I said, ‘You’d better open it!’ I couldn’t imagine what it was.”

Klein-Seetharaman’s research on rhodopsin had its roots when she was an undergraduate at Imperial College in London studying photosynthesis, she said. “Later, it was the subject of my PhD thesis and I’ve been working on it ever since.”

Klein-Seetharaman’s research focuses on membrane receptors, particularly the G protein coupled receptor rhodopsin, the visual pigment in the eye, she said. Rhodopsin is one of the genetic causes for a retinal degeneration disease, Retinitis pigmentosa. Misfolding of rhodopsin is a demonstrated cause for the disease, but it has been difficult to explain the variability in symptoms and onset of the disease seen in patients with different mutations.

“We try to address questions related to membrane receptors from a molecular and structural perspective using an interdisciplinary combination of molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, structural biology and computational biology. We are particularly interested in membrane receptor folding/misfolding, their conformational changes and their interactions,” she said.

Kazunori Koide was honored as a junior scholar for his research in organic synthesis of natural products, new synthetic methods, diversity-oriented synthesis and organic fluorescent sensors.

Nordenberg noted that Koide is a recipient of the Pitt Innovator Award, the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award and the Merck Fellowship of the Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation, as well as the Naito Foundation Fellowship. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

“You have put together a vibrant research program in two different areas of chemical research in just a few short years,” Nordenberg wrote. “You have contributed in important ways to research aimed at the total synthesis of anticancer natural products and in the area of chemical sensors. This work has garnered recognition and considerable attention in both the scientific literature and the lay press. Your research also provides prime opportunities for commercialization, and the University has signed license agreements for your technologies in both areas of research.”

Koide told the University Times, “Usually when I get [an official] letter, like for a grant application, it means it’s been rejected. Usually if it’s accepted, you get a phone call. So I was very surprised when I opened the chancellor’s letter to find I had won this award.”

Koide said his interest in anticancer therapies began in childhood. “I’ve always been interested in the cure for cancer,” he said. “I lost my father to cancer about 30 years ago when I was 9, and I was wondering why the doctors couldn’t do anything.”

Koide and his collaborators have spent much of the last decade developing an anticancer molecule he named meayamycin, a microscopic byproduct of bacteria.

His research focus on chemical sensors that detect toxic species was more serendipitous, Koide said. He happened to be standing near an undergraduate who was running a reaction test, when a fluoro-genic solution glowed bright green after it came in contact with the poisonous forms of palladium and platinum.

Normally, detecting and rooting out those toxins requires removal of other metals and impurities prior to testing. Koide’s fluorescent probe technique provides an easy and inexpensive alternative. “I could see the commercial application of this right away,” he said.

Nordenberg wrote, “Your research has been described by your peers as “courageous, innovative and inspirational.” Your colleagues go on to say that “while many with his background would take comfort in staying close to their PhD training, Dr. Koide has ventured into new areas of chemistry and has been very successful in doing so.”

—Peter Hart