Hilldale faculty awards recipients announced

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

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. This year’s recipients are:

Vernon Barger, Vilas and Van Vleck Professor of Physics
Barger is one of the most prominent physicists internationally in particle physics phenomenology, which is the mainstream of theoretical high-energy physics. His research has been highly influential in the major developments of particle physics over the past 30 years. His most recent work includes evaluating the physics potential for a conceptually new collider, the muon collider, to explore the high-energy frontier, and for a neutrino factory to uncover the mystery of neutrino oscillations.

He has trained 19 doctorate recipients, many of them through the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics Research that he founded and has directed since 1984.

Barger has been a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1998 was a Frontier Fellow at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

A native of Pennsylvania, he earned his bachelor of science and doctorate from Pennsylvania State University.

John Magnuson, professor of zoology and director of the Center for Limnology
Magnuson’s research career initially focused on environmental physiology of tuna in the Central Pacific and on fish adaptations for survival in oxygen-stressed lakes in Wisconsin. His ideas evolved to studies of lakes as islands in the contexts of community ecology and most recently landscape ecology. Magnuson’s initiatives made Wisconsin lakes a leading site for Long-Term Ecological Research using the Center for Limnology‘s field stations on Lake Mendota and Trout Lake.

Magnuson teaches limnology and ecology of fishes, aimed at entry- and mid-level science students. He enhances his teaching with computer-aided instruction and active learning.

Magnuson has formed partnerships with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and has made key contributions to science-based policy nationally and internationally in the areas of conservation biology and climate change.

Magnuson grew up in Illinois and received his bachelor and master of science degrees from the University of Minnesota and doctorate from the University of British Columbia.

Virginia Sapiro, Breckinridge Professor of Political Science
Sapiro is the preeminent scholar in the field of women and politics. The scope of her work is broad, including feminist political philosophy, comparative politics, political psychology and political behavior. She was chosen as the first president of the American Political Science Association’s section on Women and Politics Research. Her leading textbook, “Women in American Society: An Introduction to Women’s Studies,” is now in its fourth edition.

Sapiro essentially invented what has now become a standard introductory course in Women’s Studies titled Women, Social Institutions and Social Change. At the graduate level she has tackled new areas for herself and her students; she once offered a seminar on Empirical Political Psychology and Normative Political Philosophy to bridge these two areas.

She has chaired both Women’s Studies and the Department of Political Science and is active in the Women’s Mentoring Program. She also is co-principal investigator for the National Election Studies, the scholarly survey of record of the American electorate since 1948.

Born in East Orange, N.J., Sapiro earned her bachelor of arts from Clark University and master of arts and doctorate from the University of Michigan.

David Lindberg, Hilldale Professor of the History of Science
Lindberg is the leading historian of early theories of vision, the foremost specialist on Roger Bacon’s natural philosophy and one of the leading scholars on the early history of science and religion. Among his eight books is “The Beginnings of Western Science,” which has established itself as the standard text worldwide for ancient and medieval science.

His speaking ability has taken him throughout North America, Europe, Australasia and the Middle East, and his teaching talent gained him a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1981.

Lindberg helped restructure and direct the Institute for Research in the Humanities for six years and recently became chair of the Department of History of Science for the third time. Last year, he received the highest recognition for a historian of science, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society.

A native of Minneapolis, Lindberg earned a bachelor of science from Wheaton College, master of science from Northwestern University and doctorate from Indiana University.