Four faculty win research honors

Mary Burke

CLAS Awards for Excellence in Research, given this spring for the first time, were awarded to four faculty representing the four academic areas of the College: the humanities, natural sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences.

The awards went to Mary Burke, assistant professor of English; Donald H. Les, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; James F. Rusling, professor of chemistry, and Stephen L. Ross, professor of economics. Dean Jeremy Teitelbaum presented medals to the four at the annual CLAS faculty meeting in April. They also were recognized at the CLAS Commencement ceremonies.

Mary Burke came to UConn in 2004 after receiving her PhD from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Island and spending a year as an NEH Keough Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame. A specialist in Irish studies, she was invited to chair the Synge Centenary Symposium at Trinity College Dublin this year. Her book on the Irish playwright J.M. Synge and the cultural history of the Irish traveler, or “tinker” — somewhat akin to gypsies — will be published by Oxford University Press this summer. She is the only junior Synge scholar invited to contribute to an upcoming Cambridge University Press book, The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge, and she will speak at this year’s annual Synge Summer School in Wicklow, Ireland.

Donald Les received his PhD in botany from The Ohio State University and came to UConn in 1991 from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the systematics and biology of aquatic angiosperm plants. His research involves applying DNA sequence data to study the evolution of aquatic flowering plants. Much of his research has resulted in “firsts,” such as producing the first DNA phylogenies for various aquatic plants and being the first to describe several new species. He is writing a guide to the aquatic plants of North America and is working on two new National Science Foundation-funded research projects. He has been awarded more than $2 million in research grants during his career and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia. Aquatic plants, his specialty, are among the most widely distributed plants on earth, and he collaborates with scientists around the world. He is also director of the herbarium at UConn and began an electronic database there that now contains more than 65,000 records and digital images.

James Rusling has pioneered novel research at the interfaces of chemistry, biology, nanoscience, and biomedicine. In one current project, he is collaborating with materials scientists and cancer biologists, trying to develop highly sensitive biosensor arrays for early cancer detection. His research group also recently synthesized drug delivery vehicles for cancer biology collaborators to evaluate. He has had continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1982, as well as significant grants from the National Science Foundation and the state of Connecticut, among others. His work has resulted in new technologies that have become widely used, including developing “green” methods to make organic chemicals. Thin enzyme film techniques pioneered by his research group are used by researchers around the world. He has written more than 285 refereed research articles and book chapters, and he is the co-author of an influential book on advanced data analysis for the sciences. He earned his PhD in chemistry at Clarkson University, and he came to UConn in 1979. He is a fellow of the Electrochemical Society and of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Most recently, he was awarded the prestigious American Chemical Society award in electroanalytical chemistry.

Stephen Ross has spent his career studying the factors that affect the lives of disadvantaged groups of people in American cities. He is particularly interested in housing and mortgage lending discrimination and its economic costs to society. He was the research director of a nearly five-year federal Department of Housing and Urban Development study that found a dramatic decline of discrimination in home sales against African Americans and Hispanics during the 1990s. He also had a leading role in defending a controversial study that found strong evidence of mortgage lending discrimination in Boston. Recently, he received a major Ford Foundation grant to study racial and ethnic differences in subprime lending. He has studied the operation of urban labor markets, the impact of racial segregation on patterns of minority home ownership, and the impact of school segregation on students and neighborhoods. His work has been published in leading economics journals, and his book The Color of Credit is considered the standard reference for work on lending discrimination in the U.S. He was a member of the state of Connecticut’s Anti-Predatory Lending Task Force. He received his PhD from Syracuse University and came to UConn in 1994.

Stephen Ross

Donald Les