Five receive Kellett Mid-Career Awards

Five professors have received Kellett Mid-Career Awards that promote the continued scholarly efforts of established faculty.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation sponsors the $60,000 awards as one of several annual programs supported by WARF’s block grant to the university. Eligible candidates must be five to 20 years past their first promotion to a tenured position. Recipients are chosen by a committee from the Graduate School. The award is named for William R. Kellett, a former president of the WARF Board of Trustees and retired president of Kimberly Clark Corp.

The professors honored this year are:

Nicholas Abbott, professor, chemical and biological engineering. Abbott has contributed in important ways to the design and engineering of molecular interfaces, which are critical elements of many technologies that are emerging from fundamental advances in the life sciences, nano-scale materials sciences and information sciences.

Michael Barnett, professor, political science. Barnett is a world-recognized leader in international relations and Middle East politics, one of the leaders of the constructivist school of international relations. His recent work, “Eyewitness to Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda,” has been acclaimed as one of the most important studies of the Rwandan genocide.

Jane Collins, professor, rural sociology and women’s studies. Collins has researched gender and labor in Peru, Brazil, Mexico and the United States. She uses ethnographic methods to study the conditions under which women work in the agricultural sector, paid and unpaid domestic labor, and most recently, the global apparel industry.

Beverly Gordon, professor, School of Human Ecology. Gordon studies material culture with a focus on aesthetic, social and spiritual meanings of textiles and other intimate objects. She bridges the academic, artist and museum communities. Her innovative, interdisciplinary teaching addresses global design and culture.

Daniel Greenspan, professor and vice chair for research, pathology and laboratory medicine. Greenspan has made key discoveries in the intersecting fields of matrix biology, growth factor activation, development and human disease. His lab discovered and characterized a class of proteins that orchestrate formation of the extracellular matrix with activation of certain growth factors during morphogenesis.