Faculty excellence honored

Those honored include:
• Martin Harmer, the Alcoa Foundation Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of Lehigh’s Center for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and Barbara Traister, professor of English, who were both given the Hillman Faculty Award, which recognizes excellence in teaching, research, and advancing the interests of the university.
• Israel Wachs, professor of chemical engineering, who was given the Hillman Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Advising.
• Henri Barkey, the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen Professor of International Relations and department chair, who was given the Hillman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Student Advising.
• Joseph Yukich, professor of mathematics, who was given the Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching, which recognizes mastery in the educator’s field, a superior ability to communicate with others, and an exceptional talent in encouraging students to achieve their full potential.
• Rajan Menon, the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations, who was given the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, which goes to a senior member of the teaching staff for distinguished teaching performed during the current academic year.
• Stephen L. Liedtka, assistant professor of accounting, who was given the Robert and Christine Staub Faculty Excellence Award, which recognizes excellence among the faculty of the College of Business and Economics as demonstrated by classroom interaction, course design, and faculty contributions.
• Eugene Albulescu, professor of practice in the music department, and Svetlana Tatic-Lucic, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who were both given the Alfred Nobel Robinson Award, which recognizes outstanding performance in the service of the university and unusual promise of professional achievement.
• Norman Girardot, University Distinguished Professor of comparative religions and faculty coordinator of ArtsLehigh, who received the Eleanor and Joseph F. Libsch Research Award, which recognizes outstanding research and scholarly achievements.
• Richard J. Kish, professor of finance and law, who received the Carl R. and Ingeborg Beidleman Research Award, which highlights quality research and refereed scholarship in business and applied economic disciplines, and rewards those involved in distinguished research.
• Michael Gill, assistant professor of psychology, and Dawn Keetley, assistant professor of English, who both received the Lehigh Junior Award for Distinguished Teaching, which recognizes outstanding teaching performances among junior faculty.
• Also recognized were Carolyn Brockmeyer, a graduate student in psychology, Khaled Alfadhel, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and Dilip Joshi, a graduate student in economics, who each received the Lehigh University Teaching Assistant Award.
Martin Harmer
Harmer is world-renowned for his work in the microstructure and properties of electronic ceramic materials, and is particularly interested in piezoelectric materials and ceramic powder processing, including the reaction bonding of ceramics. Currently, Harmer is studying the sintering behavior of nanoparticles of gold and the mechanism of the conversion of polycrystalline alumina into single crystal sapphire for lighting applications. A fellow of the American Ceramic Society, Harmer was awarded the Sc. D. from Leeds University (England) in recognition of lifetime contributions to science. He has published more than 200 articles and has been cited more than 2,000 times in articles by other researchers. In 2002, he was named a “Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute for Scientific Information. Harmer's other awards include the Ross Coffin Purdy Best Paper Award from the American Ceramic Society, the Richard M. Fulrath Award for bridging knowledge between the Japanese and American cultures from ACS, and the Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation. Harmer joined the faculty in 1980. He holds a B.S. and Ph.D. from Leeds.
Barbara Traister
Traister arrived at Lehigh in 1973 after teaching for several years at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. The recipient of fellowships from NEH, ACLS, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Traister was also the first recipient, along with Rosemary Mundhenk, of Lehigh's Junior Award for Distinguished Teaching. She has published monographs with the University of Missouri ( Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama), and the University of Chicago Press ( The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman), and is the author of a number of journal essays on Renaissance drama, magic, and medicine. She received her B.A. from Colby College and M.Phil and Ph.D degrees from Yale University.
Israel Wachs
Wachs, the G. Whitney Snyder Professor of chemical engineering, has received many of the top awards in the field of catalysis and has been a pioneer in the use of laser Raman spectroscopy to better understand the complex structures of atomically dispersed surface oxides. In 2003, Wachs won the Industrial Innovation Award from the American Chemical Society and the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Practice Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 2002, he received the Clean Air Excellence Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for inventing a catalytic process that could save North America’s paper mills up to $300 million a year while eliminating most emissions of pollutants contained in acid rain and greenhouse gases. Wachs holds two dozen patents and has received awards for excellence in catalysis research from both the Michigan Catalysis Society and the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York. Wachs, who joined the faculty in 1987, holds a B.E. from the City University of New
York and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford. He spent a decade as a corporate research scientist with Exxon before his appointment to the faculty.
Henri Barkey
Barkey, who shared the 2003 Eleanor and Joseph F. Libsch Research Award with international relations colleague Raj Menon, came to Lehigh in 1987. He served as a member of the U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff (1998-2000) working primarily on issues related to the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and intelligence. He has authored, co-authored and edited four books, the most recent being Turkey’s Kurdish Question , which he co-wrote with Graham Fuller. Among some of his most recent scholarly articles are “The Endless Pursuit: Improving U.S.-Turkish Relations,” in Morton Abramowitz (ed.) “Friends in Need: Turkey and the United States after September 11” (New York, The Century Foundation, 2003), and “Cyprus: The Predictable Crisis,” The National Interest 66 (Winter 2001/2) with Philip H. Gordon. He received his MSc. at University College in London, and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joseph Yukich
Yukich, professor of mathematics at Lehigh since 1985, joined Lehigh in 1985 after completing his doctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002, he received the Panhel Teaching Award for most outstanding university professor. As a researcher in probability theory and stochastic processes, Yukich has published more than 50 research articles and has authored the monograph Probability Theory of Classical Euclidean Optimization Problems. His recent work involves understanding the probabilistic behavior of random graphs and random networks and is supported, in part, by tley
Keetley left a tenure-track position at North Carolina State University to come to Lehigh in the fall of 1999. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December 1994. In the year immediately prior to joining Lehigh’s faculty, she was awarded a year-long fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Since coming to Lehigh, she was awarded the Frank Hook Assistant Professorship (from 2001-2003) and the Lehigh Junior Award for Distinguished Teaching (2004), along with three Franz-Class of 1968 Junior Faculty Research Awards. Keetley has published numerous articles on antebellum U.S. literature, with a focus on women's writing, sensational fiction, and violent crime, and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Othello Complex: Men's Homicidal Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century America. She has also co-edited a three-volume collection of American feminism from the colonial period to the present (the first volume published by Madison House Publishers and the second and third volumes by Rowman and Littlefield). Her scholarly interests also include popular culture and she has published and presented papers on both reality TV and the “Law and Order” television series.
--Linda Harbrecht