University Names Three New Evan Pugh Professors
6-7-96
Three names have been added to the list of Penn State Evan Pugh Professors
-- the highest honor the University bestows on a faculty member.
This week, University President Graham B. Spanier announced those honored.
They are:
-- Dr. James B. Anderson, Evan Pugh Professor of chemistry.
-- Dr. Paul F. Baum, Evan Pugh Professor of mathematics.
-- Dr. Leonard S. Jefferson, Evan Pugh Professor of cellular and molecular
physiology.
"It is a real pleasure to see these three outstanding persons awarded
Penn State's most prestigious faculty title," Dr. Spanier said. "Their
achievements inspire students and faculty colleagues and greatly enhance
Penn State's leadership."
The University last named Evan Pugh Professors in 1994, when five faculty
members were accorded the honor.
Appointment of these research scholars brings to 23 the number of Evan Pugh
Professors currently serving Penn State. A total of 49 appointments have
been made since the professorships were established in 1960. Nine are now
deceased, 14 have retired, and three have taken posts at other universities.
A committee of seven distinguished faculty members, including three Evan
Pugh Professors, reviewed nominations for the honor and made recommendations
to President Spanier.
Evan Pugh Professorships are awarded to faculty members whose "research
publications or creative work or both have been of the highest quality over
a period of time, and further to candidates who show evidence of having
contributed significantly to the education of students who later achieve
recognition for excellence in the candidates' discipline or interdisciplinary
areas."
JAMES B. ANDERSON
Dr. Anderson is a professor of chemistry in the Eberly College of Science
whose work in physical chemistry has yielded important breakthroughs in
such fields as surface science, supersonic molecular beams, crossed-beam
reactive scattering, the rare event approach to molecular dynamics, and
quantum mechanics. Among other research efforts, he pioneered the application
of the quantum Monte Carlo method to the calculation of the energies of
atomic interactions, resulting in a series of exact predictions for small
molecules and highly accurate predictions for larger systems.
He earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at Penn State
in 1957, a master's from the University of Illinois in 1958, and a Ph.D.
from Princeton University in 1963. He did postdoctoral research and became
an assistant professor at Princeton before joining Yale University as an
associate professor in 1968. He returned to Penn State in 1974 and became
a full professor in 1976.
Dr. Anderson's research has been supported by grants from the National Science
Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval Research, and the American Chemical
Society, among other sources. He is currently continuing his studies of
"Quantum Chemistry by Random Walk" with NSF funding and is a co-researcher
on the projects "Physics of Correlated Systems," "High Performance
Computing in Materials Physics and Chemistry," and "Curriculum
Development in Advanced Computation." He has also served as a consultant
to such organizations as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Exxon
Research and Engineering Company, and GTE Sylvania Incorporated.
Beside his new Evan Pugh designation, in his career he has received Silver
and Gold Evan Pugh Medals, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship,
a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal, and a Humboldt Prize. He is also a fellow
of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science and a former associate editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics.
Dr. Anderson has supervised 16 Ph.D. students and 10 postdoctoral projects,
most recently resulting in three Ph.D.'s completed in 1995 while three others
are currently underway.
PAUL F. BAUM
Dr. Baum is a distinguished professor of mathematics in the Eberly College
of Science who has gained international recognition for his work on applying
K-theory to a variety of mathematical problems. Among his important early
research was the extension of the Riemann-Roch theorem to algebraic varieties
which may be singular. His current projects include studies that center
on a proposed formula for the K-theory of group C* algebras. This work cuts
across several different branches of mathematics to unify a number of well-known
problems in representation theory and geometry-topology and can be applied
to such topics as the layout of trees, buildings and symmetric spaces.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1958. Following
a year at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, he earned his master's
and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1961 and 1963, respectively.
Before joining Penn State in 1987, he taught at Princeton and Brown University.
He has been a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge Universities; a visiting
member of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute in Berkeley; and a visiting mathematician at the Institut
des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette, France, since 1980.
He has held an uninterrupted National Science Foundation Research Grant
since 1965 and the NSF, Penn State, and the University of Colorado will
hold a meeting in honor of his 60th birthday in Boulder in July. His work
has also earned funding from the United States-United Kingdom and United
States-France Cooperative Science Program Research Grants.
He has lectured about mathematics extensively in the United States, Canada,
Europe, the United Kingdom, Central and South America, and Japan. Recently,
he was an invited speaker at a conference in Moscow honoring the 100th anniversary
of the birth of Russian mathematician P.S. Alexandrov.
Recent Ph.D. recipients whose graduate projects were supervised by Dr. Baum
have gone on to teaching positions at such institutions as Virginia Tech,
the University of Hokkaido, and Dartmouth College.
LEONARD S. (JIM) JEFFERSON
Dr. Jefferson is professor and chair of cellular and molecular physiology
and associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Medicine
at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. His research has concentrated on
diseases associated with disorders of endocrinology and metabolism, especially
diabetes, nutrient deprivation, and obesity. In recent years, he has been
interested in characterizing the diabetes-induced biochemical and molecular
lesions in protein synthesis in mammalian tissues such as liver, heart,
and skeletal muscle, and in elucidating mechanisms involved in the action
of insulin to correct these lesions.
His research is funded through two long-standing grants from the National
Institute of Diabetes and Kidney Diseases and through two grants from the
Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International. He is also co-investigator on
another research grant, director of a post-doctoral training grant in endocrinology,
diabetes and metabolism, and co-director of a pre-doctoral training grant
in physiological adaptations to stress, all from the National Institutes
of Health.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Eastern Kentucky University in 1961,
took special studies at Harvard University in 1962, earned a Ph.D. from
Vanderbilt University in 1966, and pursued postdoctoral studies at Cambridge
University in 1966-67. He joined Penn State as an instructor in 1967 and
rose to full professor by 1975. He is currently a consultant for the Diabetes
Centers at the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania,
and the University of Massachusetts.
He has won such honors as the Elliot P. Joslin Award and the Lilly Award,
both from the American Diabetes Association, the MERIT Award from the National
Institutes of Health, and the David Rumbough Scientific Award from the Juvenile
Diabetes Foundation International. He became president of the American Physiological
Society in 1995. He has served on editorial boards for the journal Diabetes
and the Journal of Biological Chemistry and is a former editor of the American
Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Dr. Jefferson is also co-director of the Intercollege Graduate Program in
Physiology and has supervised the graduate work of 20 students who received
a Ph.D. or M.D. from Penn State and the research of 25 postdoctoral fellows.
**gwc**
Contact:
Gary W. Cramer (814) 865-9481 (office) (814) 231-0590 (home) gwc104@psu.edu
Christy Rambeau (814) 865-7517 (office) (814) 237-9046 (home) cmr7@psu.edu
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