Four UW-Madison faculty receive Hilldale Awards

Four UW–Madison faculty members have been chosen to receive this year’s Hilldale Awards for major achievements in teaching, research and service.

Developed in 1987 for former Chancellor Irving Shain, the Hilldale Awards are given to a top professor in each of four areas of the university: physical sciences, biological sciences,

social sciences and humanities. Recipients are nominated by their peers and selected by the executive committee in their faculty division.

Winners receive a stipend of $7,500 from the Hilldale Fund, which receives income from the operation of the Hilldale Shopping Center. This year’s recipients are:

Joanne Cantor
Professor of communication arts

Cantor is one of the nation’s leading researchers on the psychological impacts of media, especially television, on children. Her work has focused on children’s fright reactions to mass media, ratings and advisories for TV programming, children’s attraction to violent TV, and the benefits of educational or pro-social TV. She has summarized much of her research in a book titled “Mommy, I’m Scared,” which shows parents how academic research can help them cope with today’s media.

Cantor has served as a consultant for Wisconsin Public Television, the American Medical Association and the National PTA. She frequently appears as keynote speaker at conferences of parenting organizations and child advocacy groups. Her former graduate students are recognized as among the best of their cohort, holding tenured positions around the country.

Cantor has been a UW–Madison faculty member since 1974 and served as associate dean for social science of the College of Letters and Science from 1990 to 1994. A native of Washington, D.C., she earned her bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, master’s at the University of Pennsylvania and doctorate at Indiana University.

W. Harmon Ray
Vilas Professor of Chemical Engineering

Ray’s research is followed closely by leading companies in the chemical process industry in the U.S., Europe and Japan. These companies have joined his consortium, the University of Wisconsin Polymerization Reaction Engineering Laboratory. Twenty corporations now use a software package Ray and his research group developed for polymerization reactor design. His work on the fundamental principles of polymerization has also attracted support from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Many of Ray’s students have gone on to key engineering positions with Dow, DuPont and Kodak, as well as other research universities. His third textbook, “Process Dynamics, Modeling and Control,” has been adopted by many engineering departments for undergraduates.

Ray has served on key committees of the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering. His university assignments have included a three-year term on the Physical Sciences Divisional Committee. Born in Washington, D.C., he holds two bachelor’s degrees from Rice University and a doctorate from the University of Minnesota.

William Weege
Professor of art

Weege is best-known for his large abstract handmade paper projects. Often produced for corporate commissions, they can be seen at the Prudential Building in Minneapolis, the Renaissance Center in Detroit and Honda Headquarters in Tennessee. He has had nearly 50 solo exhibitions.

For the past 10 years, Weege has collaborated with Sam Gilliam; the two produced the world’s largest print in 1991, a 600-yard band of cast paper exhibited around the world. He has collaborated with many other key figures in art, including Jack Beal and Alice Aycock.

Weege, a UW–Madison faculty member since 1971, founded the university’s Tandem Press in 1987 to encourage research, collaboration and innovation in printmaking. It now is one of the nation’s foremost printmaking studios in the U.S., with eight visiting artists a year producing print editions sold to support press operations. Each artist gives lectures on campus and conducts critiques with art graduate students.

After growing up in Port Washington, Wis., Weege earned a bachelor’s degree, master of science and master of fine arts at UW–Madison.

Bernard Weisblum
Professor of pharmacology

Weisblum has done seminal work on how antibiotics function at the molecular level and how they regulate antibiotic resistance. His research in this area is cited as a paradigm of gene regulation. In other studies, his lab was the first east of the Rockies to perform recombinant DNA experiments, and he was instrumental in introducing the technology to the Madison campus.

His current work has turned to understanding mechanisms of emerging bacterial resistance to vancomycin, an antibiotic of last resort. His group is now focusing on the action of compounds that can reverse resistance.

Graduate students often speak of Weisblum’s enthusiasm and ability to capture their interest, as well as to teach them technologies they will use in their careers. Students and postdoctoral fellows from the Far East and Europe have worked in his lab over the past 25 years, moving into leading positions in their field.

Weisblum has been a faculty member in the Medical School since 1964. His recent committee activity has included the Medical School Research Committee and the Biological Sciences Divisional Committee.