Points of Distinction

KU libraries continue to be leaders in the Open Access movement. KU was the first public institution in the United States to adopt an open access policy and became one of the first American universities to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

The goal of open access is to make scholarly research more accessible to a broad section of researchers and the public by using the advantages provided by digital and electronic communication.

KU faculty ranked second nationwide for the number of prestigious Fulbright awards they received, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Nine KU faculty members received the awards, which enable recipients to teach and conduct research overseas for a year.

KU's Center for Research on Learning has been granted $12.5 million to help the nation’s largest federal training program for skilled and semi-skilled workers better prepare young people for jobs in construction and health care.

Under the five-year federal Department of Labor contract, the center will lead a consortium charged with training Job Corps staff and contractors to use more effective teaching methods for the 60,000 persons ages 16-24 who enroll in Job Corps programs each year. Many of them are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and have had limited success in school.

Daryl Mellard, director of the center's Division of Adult Studies, is executive director of the Consortium for Excellence in Job Corps Staff Development. The consortium's five other participating organizations are in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Georgia, and Denver.

Black scientists were significantly less likely than their white counterparts to receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to an analysis of data from 2000 to 2006.

KU professor of economics Donna Ginther was the lead author on the study commissioned by the NIH; it appeared in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.

The researchers found a 10 percentage point gap in research funding — even after taking into consideration demographics, education and training, employer characteristics, NIH experience and research productivity.

“In order to improve the health outcomes of all Americans, it's important for the biomedical workforce to reflect the diversity of the population,” Ginther said. “As the population becomes increasingly diverse, we will continue to get further from that goal unless the research community intervenes.

All NIH grant applications from 2000-2006 were reviewed in the two-year study of 83,000 submissions.

KU's Department of Special Education has been ranked No. 2 in the number of published journal articles by Science Watch.

Articles by researchers and faculty published in peer-reviewed journals are an important indication of a university's contributions to a field of study. Also in the top 5: Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Louisiana State University.

U.S. News and World Report egularly ranks KU’s special education master's program No. 1 in the nation among public institutions.

Robert C. Rowland, professor of communication studies, has received the 2011 Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association.

The award is the NCA's top research award in rhetorical studies. It honors an outstanding scholar who has done research in rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, or public address studies.

Valentino J. Stella has received the Distinguished Pharmaceutical Scientist Award from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Stella is the University Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

The award is the highest honor granted by the association, which bestows the award no more than every two years and only when a worthy candidate is identified.

Thomas Prisinzano, associate professor of medicinal chemistry, will be honored by a national organization for outstanding early career achievement in the science of drug addiction. Prisinzano will receive the 2011 College on Problems of Drug Dependence Joseph Cochin Young Investigator Award at the organization’s 73rd annual meeting June 19 in Hollywood, Fla. He is only the second chemist to receive the award.

Emily Scott, associate professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Kansas, has received national recognition for her research on the structure and function of cytochrome P450 enzymes — proteins responsible for the breakdown of drugs and other foreign chemicals in the body.

Scott has been named a recipient of the 2011 Drug Metabolism Division Early Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

Barry Fitzgerald, associate professor of design at the University of Kansas, has been selected for “Best Illustrators Worldwide 2010/2011.” His work will be included in a volume published by Lüerzer’s Archive Inc. this spring.

Fitzgerald submitted work for the competition late last year. His work was selected from more than 6,000 submissions from more than 1,100 artists around the globe. Lüerzer’s, a publishing company that produces books and magazines dedicated to visual communications, selected Fitzgerald’s piece “Spring.”

Marigold Linton, director for American Indian outreach in the Office for Diversity in Science Training at the University of Kansas, has been recommended by the National Science Foundation to receive a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

This is KU’s first such award. Linton will travel to Washington, D.C., to receive the award from President Obama at a White House ceremony. She is one of 11 individuals and four organizations selected for the honor.

Three University of Kansas researchers and a KU alumnus are part of a monumental $120 million multi-university undertaking to overhaul how reading is taught to U.S. children by 2015.

The Reading for Understanding Research Initiative is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

Using powerful lasers, Hui Zhao, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, and graduate student Lalani Werake have discovered a new way to recognize currents of spinning electrons within a semiconductor.

Their findings could lead the way to development of superior computers and electronics. Results from their work in KU’s Ultrafast Laser Lab will be published in the September issue of Nature Physics, a leading peer-reviewed journal, and was posted online in early August.

Zhao and Werake research spin-based electronics, dubbed “spintronics.”

“The goal is to replace everything — from computers to memory devices — to have higher performance and less energy consumption,” said Zhao.

Donald Worster, the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of U.S. History at the University of Kansas, received the Scottish Book of the Year Award for his biography “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” from the Scottish Arts Council. The award is funded by the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.

Worster will receive 30,000 British pounds in recognition of his literary talent and the significance of his biography, which positions Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, as a national icon for Scotland and a figure of global significance for concern about the environment.

John Karanicolas, assistant professor of molecular biosciences and bioinformatics, has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, which provides $50,000 in research support over two years.

The prestigious fellowships are given to young faculty members performing promising research in physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience.

Karanicolas' research studies how cells communicate with each other in the brain.