Four professors in national spotlight for their teaching, research

Four Brown professors have been honored by national organizations this spring for their work:

• Amy Greenwald, assistant professor of computer science, and Ian Dell'Antonio, assistant professor of physics, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers;
• Thomas Banchoff, professor of mathematics, is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award;
• Elliot Colla, assistant professor of comparative literature, has been selected by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to receive a New Directions Fellowship.

Greenwald and Dell'Antonio received the 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) at a White House award ceremony May 4. They were among 20 National Science Foundation-supported researchers from colleges and universities nationwide who received the awards.

The PECASE program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. It is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.

As award winners, Greenwald and Dell'Antonio show promise as leaders in their fields and demonstrate that they've translated their work into significant education activities, according to officials at the National Science Foundation.

Greenwald has advanced the theory of how automated software agents can make decisions in uncertain environments such as online auctions. She advises a summer outreach computer program for ninth-graders, advises Brown undergraduate and graduate students, and has recruited young women into the computer science department.

Dell'Antonio is recognized for research in using weak gravitational lensing of galaxies to map out the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter in the universe, and to explore the nature of the recently discovered dark energy. He is using the data to develop research projects for high school students from disadvantaged areas in Providence, and to develop laboratories for introductory astronomy students at Brown.

Banchoff has been named a 2004 Distinguished Teaching Scholar by the National Science Foundation.

The awards, which recognize the recipients' efforts at connecting scientific research and education and their proposals for continuing their work, enable the recipients to improve how science, technology, engineering and mathematics research translates into undergraduate instruction of students, including those not majoring in these fields.

Banchoff's project involves interactive Internet-based mathematics courses in multivariable calculus, geometry and liberal arts mathematics.

In the past, the NSF has described these faculty as "the ones who show undergraduate students that scientists are made, not born" by "pulling back the curtain of science with imaginative, informative and insightful practices and projects that make the opportunity of experiencing science accessible to all students."

Colla is the recipient of a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Colla will undertake contemporary legal studies in order to pursue research into the history of law and literature in modern Egypt. He will study in particular two aspects of law - the relation of Islamic and secular law in Egypt and the history of legal professions - within the frameworks of contemporary "Law and Society" studies and traditional Islamic jurisprudence.

Next year he will attend the New York University Law and Society Program and the Kevorkian Center for Middle East Studies. During the following two summers he will take an intensive tutorial, in Arabic, in basic Islamic legal concepts (usul al-fiqh) with scholars from al-Azhar University and Cairo University, to be administered through the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University in Cairo. This training will allow Colla to acquire a disciplinary grounding in the methods and questions in the study of law and society; to gain a similar foundation in contemporary Islamic legal scholarship, in particular the relationship between religious and secular forms of law in the Middle East; and finally to study the history of legal professions, not only in terms of formal developments in the techniques of representation, but also in terms of political mobilization.

New Directions Fellowships assist mid-career faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to acquire systematic training outside their own disciplines.