Professors Receive Faculty Scholar Medals

3-28-96
Five Penn State professors will receive 1995 Faculty Scholar Medals for Outstanding Achievement during the Faculty/Staff Awards ceremony on Sunday, March 31, at 2 p.m. at the Nittany Lion Inn.

They are William J. Duiker, liberal arts professor of East Asian history for the arts and humanities medal; Joseph L. Rose, Paul Morrow Professor of Engineering Design and Manufacturing, for the engineering medal; Daniel J. Cosgrove, professor of biology for the life and health Sciences medal; Dmitri Burago, assistant professor of Mathematics for the physical sciences medal; and Karen L. Bierman, professor of psychology for the social and behavioral sciences medal.

Established in 1980, the Penn State award recognizes scholarly or creative excellence represented by a single contribution or a series of contributions around a coherent theme. A committee of faculty peers reviews nominations and selects candidates. The recipients are approved by Penn State President Graham Spanier.

Duiker is honored for addressing key issues in the history of Southeast Asia and its involvement with Western powers in his books, "The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam," "China and Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict," "The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam," and "U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina."

His works have had significant influence both within and without academia, reaching wide public audiences and stimulating our thinking about our past role in Southeast Asia and our continuing responsibilities there.

Duiker received his B.A. in political science from Dickinson College in 1954, his B.S. in foreign service, his M.A. in Russian history and Ph.D. in Far Eastern history from Georgetown University in 1955, 1961 and 1968, respectively. Before joining Penn State in 1967 as an assistant professor of history, he served from 1955 to 1958 in the U.S. Army. From 1959 to 1965 he was a foreign affairs analyst and then a foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State, including service in Vietnam from 1964-65. He became professor in 1974 and was appointed Liberal Arts Professor of East Asian Studies in 1994.

Rose has made significant contributions in the invention and development of the Penn State Ultrasonic Guided Wave Probe, a device developed for detection of defects in the skin and underlying structure of aircraft for improving air transport safety. This device could also be used to inspect various other engineering systems such as the Alaskan pipeline.

This extraordinary achievement is due to his fundamental research and understanding of Lamb waves and he is considered in the non-destructive evaluation field as an international authority in the ultrasound guided-wave method for defect detection andpattern recognition.

Rose received his Ph.D. from Drexel in 1969. He began his academic career at Drexel as an assistant professor in 1965 and rose to the rank of Soffa Professor. He was named Paul Morrow Professor at Penn State in 1992. He is also adjunct professor of radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and guest scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Cosgrove will receive his award for his pioneering work on expansins -- proteins that are responsible for the mechanism of plant cell wall expansion. His research on the biophysics, biochemistry, physiology and, more recently, molecular biology of these proteins, demonstrates great breadth. His imaginative and creative work represents a major breakthrough in the concept of plant cell growth.

He received his B.A. in botany from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1974 and his Ph.D in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1980. He was a visiting research scientist at Kernforschungsanlage, Juelich, Germany in 1980 and did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1981-82. He joined Penn State in 1983 as an assistant professor and became professor in1991. He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator from 1984 to 1989 and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a McKnight Foundation Award in 1986-89, a Fulbright Senior Professor Award in 1989-90, and a Charles A. Shull Award from the American Society of Plant Physiologists in 1993. He was a John Simon Guggenhiem Fellow in 1989.

Burago's proof of two outstanding conjectures is considered a major achievement in Riemannian geometry. His investigation of periodic curved n-dimensional spaces like the ones obtained by mass distributions in general relativity are significant proving applicable to numerous other problems that only recently seemed unsolvable.

His first achievement concerns periodically perturbed Euclidian spaces still having exactly one shortest curve between each pair of points. He proved that such spaces must be flat Euclidean space. His second achievement describes the rate of growth of the volume of a ball in any curved periodic n-dimensional space, in comparison to the corresponding growth in a flat space.

Burago received his Diploma of Mathematician Summa Cum Laude in 1986 and his Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1992 from the St.-Petersburg State University, Russia. He became an assistant professor in the department of mathematics and mechanics at St.-Petersburg State University in 1990, but left there in 1994 to become a postdoctoral lecturer at the David Rittenhouse Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania. He became an assistant professor of mathematics at Penn State in 1995.

He became a scientific researcher at the Laboratory for Theory of Algorithms, St.-Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, Russian Academy of Sciences in 1986 and has been on leave from that position since 1994.

Bierman has been a pioneer in the rapidly emerging area of developmental psychopathology. She is recognized as a leader in conceptualizing the merger of the rich empirical data of clinical practice with the highly articulated theories and rigorous research requirements of developmental psychology and epidemiology required for progress in this complex area.

Within this broad domain, her special interest is in the etiological heterogeneity of conduct disorders of children and adolescents. She is a principal investigator in the nationwide Multisite Prevention of Conduct Disorder project, largest such program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and is recognized as one of the leaders in this area of mental health research.

Bierman received her B.A. with distinction in psychology in 1975 from Stanford University. She receive an M.A. and Ph.D. in child clinical psychology from the University of Denver in 1978 and 1981 respectively. She began her academic career as assistant professor in clinical psychology at Penn State in 1981, became associate professor in 1987 and professor in 1992. She received the Panhellenic Council of PSU Outstanding Woman Faculty Member award in 1995, the Distinction in the Social Sciences Award from the College of Liberal Arts in 1993 and she was a William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholar from 1982-87.

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