Several University of Wisconsin faculty members received a combined total of more than $600,000 in awards Monday to continue and promote graduate research on campus.
Six faculty members received the Kellett Mid-Career Award, and the university named another five professors who received the Romnes Awards, both of which are given to tenured UW faculty. Each award recipient will receive an unrestricted reward of either $50,000 or $60,000 to continue research in a specific field of study.
Nancy Keller, professor of plant pathology and microbiology and Kellett Mid-Career Award recipient, said research committees of UW professors and peers nominate faculty for the awards. And the monetary reward, she added, is an important part of continuing research at UW.
"There's two very important aspects of keeping [research] going," Keller said. "One is paying graduate student salaries, and the other is to buy materials for them to work with — all these things cost money."
With the funding boost to her work with gene expression and evolution in plants, Keller said she is "happy" and "honored" to be a recipient of the award. Keller also said she has been a part of UW's extensive research program since 2001.
Richard Amasino, professor of biochemistry and Kellett Mid-Career Award recipient, said he has been conducting research at UW for more than 21 years but added a faculty member can only receive the award and grant money once.
"I feel very grateful and humbled that my colleagues would choose me for this," Amasino said. "The money is used for research, so this gives us an opportunity to do some additional research things we otherwise wouldn't normally be able to do."
Amasino, who works with both graduate and undergraduate students in all biochemistry fields at the university, said he would use the $60,000 to understand how plants can distinguish between changing seasons and know when to blossom in the spring. Scientists around the world have always recognized the process, he added, but they have never been able to understand the phenomenon at a molecular level.
Though the federal government funds some UW research, Amasino said awards like Kellett and Romnes provide better opportunities to advance certain areas of study.
Romnes Award winner John Martin, professor of sociology, said he works primarily with graduate students and will explore mathematical models on opinion data with the $50,000 grant. His research, Martin added, focuses on social structures and the way people are represented.
"Almost all of [the money] will go toward funding graduate students," Martin said. "That's around five semesters of funding."
Both the Kellett Mid-Career Award and the Romnes Award are supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and are named after former presidents of the WARF board of trustees. Areas of research study that will receive the award funding include psychology, theater, chemistry, physics, economics and history.
Other recipients of the awards are John Curtin, Aparna Dharwadker, Anna Huttenlocher, Shannon Stahl, Susan Coppersmith, Charles Engel, James Leary and Lee Palmer Wandel.
