Romnes Fellowships awarded to five faculty

Five faculty members have received Romnes Fellowships from a program that helps younger faculty further establish their scholarly careers.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation supports the $50,000 fellowships. Recipients are faculty who have attained tenure within the prior four years; they are chosen by a committee of the university’s Graduate School. The awards are named for the late H.I. Romnes, former chair of the board of AT&T and former president of the WARF Board of Trustees.

The recipients are:

• Amy Quan Barry, associate professor, English. Barry’s accomplishments in the department include the implementation of its new master of fine arts program, for which she is co-administrator. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at UW–Madison. In 2004, her second book, “Controvertibles,” was published amid high critical praise.
• Heinz Klug, professor, Law School. Klug’s writing focuses on comparative constitutionalism, property rights, access to essential medicines and human rights law. He has worked with the South African Ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry and the Ministry of Land Affairs on water law and land tenure issues. He also was on the secretariat of the African National Congress Land Commission.
• Shigeki Miyamoto, associate professor, pharmacology. Miyamoto’s current research focuses on determining how molecular communications change gene expression inside mammalian cells and how these events result in cancer development and drug resistance, with the aim of developing new anticancer drugs.
• Paul Nealey, associate professor, chemical and biological engineering. Nealey is founding director of the National Science Foundation’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center in Templated Synthesis and Assembly at the Nanoscale, and he is director of the Semiconductor Research Corp. Advanced Lithography Program, both at UW–Madison. He has received the National Science Foundation Career Award, as well as the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
• Jenny Saffran, associate professor, psychology. Saffran’s research focuses on the question of how babies learn language. Her experiments demonstrate the extraordinary learning abilities that infants bring to early language learning tasks, such as finding words in speech and combining words in grammar. She also studies how infants learn music.