Distinguished Scholar Award recipients announced

Distinguished Scholar Awards for 2009-2010 have been presented to professors Nicholas Money, botany; Laura Neack, political science; and Kay Sloan, English, in recognition of a substantial and continuing record of research or creative activity. Janet Burge, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering, received the Distinguished Scholar Award for a junior faculty member who has demonstrated great potential as a scholar or an artist.

The scholars, named by the committee on faculty research (CFR) and the office for the advancement of research and scholarship (OARS), receive a $2,000 grant for the pursuit of further research or creative endeavor.

Money, currently director of the western program and an affiliate of the women’s program, is recognized internationally as an expert in the field of fungal biology, including fungal growth and development, tissue invasion by disease-causing fungi and the mechanisms that launch fungal spores into the air. His research has applied implications for indoor mold problems and he has served as a consultant for several companies, as well as an expert witness during courtroom testimony. Money is senior editor of Fungal Biology, editorial reviewer for the journal Fungi, co-editor of the journal Lloydiana and a member of the executive board of Fungal Biology Reviews. His research has been supported by more than $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

In addition to his scholarly publications, which include 66 journal articles, Money has published three popular books on fungi The Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History (2007); Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores: A Natural History of Toxic Mold (2004); and Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard: The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Mold and Mycologists (2002). He is working on his first novel, a comedy of errors about the conflict between science and religious faith.

Neack, an internationally respected scholar of peacekeeping and international security, currently serves as the president-elect of the Foreign Policy Analysis section of the International Studies Association (ISA). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Foreign Policy Analysis and of the book series New Millennium Books in International Studies; she is also a member of the advisory board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. She was chief departmental adviser for Miami’s diplomacy and foreign affairs majors from 1998 to 2009, and was the Rejai Professor of Political Science, 2002-2007.

Several of her books have been adopted by scholars worldwide for the classroom, including her most recent, The New Foreign Policy: Power Seeking in a Globalized Area, second edition (2008). She is co-editor of Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in the Second Generation (1995), which has become a “staple of advanced undergraduate and graduate education in the study of foreign policy and solidified (Neack’s) place as one of the real forces in the discipline,” says a nominator. She is also author of Elusive Security: States First, People Last (2007) and of The New Foreign Policy: U.S. and Comparative Foreign Policy in the 21st Century (2003) and is co-editor of Global Society in Transition: An International Politics Reader (2002).

Sloan’s award-winning work, encompassing fiction, poetry, academic nonfiction, film and editing, has won recognition in several different fields, including fiction writing, American studies and women’s studies. Her poetry collection, The Birds Are On Fire (2005) received the New Women’s Voices Poetry Award; her novel The Patron Saint of Red Chevys (2004) was named a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Authors” selection; and her first novel, Worry Beads (2002), received the Ohioana Award for Best Fiction. She has also received grants from the Ohio Arts Council for her writing.

Her groundbreaking study in early cinema, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (1989) is widely cited by film studies scholars. She received an Ohio Humanities Council grant for making her documentary “Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema,” which premiered in 2003 at the International Silent Film Festival in Italy and has since been shown at film festivals throughout Europe and the U.S. Her work in cultural studies also includes the book Not Without Honor: The Wartime Journal of Claudio Stefeno Carano (2009), which has been called “superb;” her first book, Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska 1899 (1982), became the subject of a PBS documentary on the expedition, which aired in 2003. Her current projects include both a novel and another scholarly book on the contributions that white native Southerners made to the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s.

Burge is a specialist in software engineering and conducts research in design rationale, a subfield of Artificial Intelligence in design. She is the lead author of a newly released book, What Makes Software Design Effective, which has been hailed as “a new standard reference,” according to reviewers. Since she joined Miami in 2005, Burge has been awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for more than $500,000 to support her research for the next five years on “Rationale Capture for High Assurance Systems.” She is also co-principal investigator on two other NSF funded projects worth more than $860,000 for research into integrating writing and other communication instruction, assignments and activities into the full four years of software engineering and computer science undergraduate programs. She has partnered with faculty at other universities and with the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami for curricular development.

Prior to joining Miami, Burge was associate senior scientist at Charles River Analytics, Inc. and instructor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She received her doctorate from Worcester Polytechnic in 2005.

The deadline for submitting nominations for the 2010-2011 Distinguished Scholars is Nov. 1. For more information go to www.units.muohio.edu/oars/mu_research/cfr_programs.