Ten faculty members honored with Kellett Awards

Ten University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty members have been honored for their research with Kellett Mid-Career Awards.

The award, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), recognizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who are five to 20 years past the first promotion to a tenured position. Each winner, chosen by a Graduate School committee, receives a $60,000 flexible research award.

The award is named for William R. Kellett, a former president of the WARF board of trustees and retired president of Kimberly-Clark Corp.

This year’s recipients are:

• William Bement, zoology, who studies how the cytoskeleton controls cell division and wound healing. He is also a leader in biology education and is chair of the Cell and Molecular Biology graduate program and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
• Michael Bernard-Donals, English, who has a national and international reputation for his work on rhetoric and Holocaust studies. He has authored four monographs, one co-written book and three co-edited essay collections, two special issues of journals, more than 50 essays published in refereed journals and more than 70 conference presentations.
• Kathryn Hendley, political science and the Law School, who has researched various aspects of the Russian legal system, including labor law, privatization, contract law, and the implementation of judicial decisions, focusing on how the law is used — or avoided — in daily life. She is currently an associate dean in the Law School.
• Mark Hill, computer sciences and electrical and computer engineering, who has been named a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his research on advancing parallel computer hardware. He is an avid teacher and earned the 2009 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) Distinguished Service Award.
• Paul Lambert, oncology, who studies papillomaviruses that cause human cancer and recently identified a novel approach for treating and preventing these cancers. He is an editor of the journal Virology and director of the Cancer Biology graduate program and helped create a UW–Madison class on science ethics.
• Richard Lindroth, entomology, who is internationally recognized for his research in chemical ecology at numerous levels from genes to ecosystems, particularly in relation to global environmental change. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• Robert Mathieu, astronomy, a widely renowned expert on the evolution of stellar spin. He is a dedicated teacher and founding director of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning. He is a past chair of the University Committee and is currently chair of the astronomy department.
• Jan Miernowski, French and Italian, a highly regarded scholar of French literature of the Renaissance. He has worked at the intersections of literature, philosophy, and theology of the period, and is currently writing a study of the aesthetic of hatred in French literature from the 16th through the 20th centuries.
• William Sandholm, economics, who researches evolutionary game theory, a modeling paradigm developed by biologists, economists and mathematicians to study the dynamics of behavior in large populations of simple, strategically interacting agents. He has written a survey of the field that will be published this summer.
• Kirsten Wolf, Scandinavian studies, the Torger Tompson Chair and Professor of Old Norse-Icelandic and Scandinavian linguistics and current chair of the Scandinavian studies department. In her 14 books, approximately 60 scholarly articles and book chapters, and numerous book reviews, she has made significant contributions in the fields of historical linguistics, hagiography, anthropology, ethnology, philology, manuscript studies and medieval literature.