2 rising stars in research receive $150,000 Self faculty scholar awards

LAWRENCE -- Two University of Kansas faculty members -- a professor researching the potential of fuel cells and a geologist examining the explosive evolution of animal life during the Cambrian Radiation Period 550 million years ago -- have been named Self faculty scholars for 2002-2005.

Trung Van Nguyen, associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, and Bruce Lieberman, assistant professor of geology, will receive $50,000 annually for three years to finance their research. They may use the funds in any way to support their research and careers, including paying for personnel, equipment, supplies or travel directly related to research.

Four finalists -- Rohini Ahluwalia, associate professor of business; Sandra Quackenbush, assistant professor of biological sciences; Rodolfo Torres, associate professor of mathematics; and Jeffrey Urbauer, assistant professor of biological sciences -- each will receive a one-time $5,000 award.

This is the third time the scholarships, created by Madison "Al" and Lila Self of Hinsdale, Ill., have been awarded. The Self Faculty Scholar Award recognizes and helps support KU faculty members in engineering, business and the sciences who are early in their careers and have demonstrated the potential to establish internationally renowned and peer-acclaimed scholarship within their research fields. Each year, the Self faculty scholars program selects two faculty members.

The award also acknowledges professors who are prepared to mentor pre-doctoral students in the Self graduate fellowship program. In addition to conducting research, the faculty scholars will serve as mentors to students in the Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellowship Program. The fellowships are awarded annually to incoming doctoral students who have outstanding records in scholarship and who are judged to possess unusual leadership potential.

The Selfs established the fellowships in 1989 and have made several additional contributions to the endowed fund for this program, which currently supports 35 students.

An external review committee, chaired by KU Chancellor Emeritus Del Shankel, evaluated the candidates' applications. Candidates are nominated by the deans of their schools and chairs of their departments.

Al Self, who has been a leader in the business world, met his wife, Lila, when both were students at KU. They married in 1943, the same year he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. In 1947, he acquired Bee Chemical Co. in Lansing, Ill. When he sold the company 37 years later, it had grown from a staff of three to a sizable corporation with five U.S. manufacturing sites and operations in Japan and England.

Lila Reetz Self, a native of Eudora, attended KU with the class of 1943. Over the years she has maintained a special interest in art and architecture and has been active in the community, including serving on the Student Life Committee at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology. The couple has one son.

Biographies

Trung Van Nguyen received his doctorate in chemical engineering from Texas A&M and held a postdoctoral position at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Nguyen was named a Bellows scholar by the School of Engineering (2001-2002), has received an excellence in teaching award from the Center for Teaching Excellence (2001) and received the Inventor's Award from Los Alamos National Laboratory (1994). His research interests involve the modeling and characterization of fuel cells.

From Nguyen's proposal:

"Fuel cells are considered as the most promising power conversion devices for the 21st century because of their high efficiencies and non-polluting characteristics. With the potential of replacing the combustion engines and combustion-based power plants as the power sources, the fuel cell industry is expected to become one of the largest industries in the next millennium. Current obstacles are their high costs and low performance. To solve these problems and help bring this new technology to commercialization quickly, I am conducting research to understand the phenomena involved in the operation of the fuel cells and help identify the limiting processes."

Bruce Lieberman received his doctorate in geology from Columbia University and held postdoctoral positions at Yale University and Harvard University. Lieberman received the Jan F. & Mary L. van Sant Geology Excellence Award (2000) and is a distinguished lecturer for the Paleontological Society (2000-2003). The focus of Lieberman's research is to study the ecology and evolution of the Cambrian radiation.

From Lieberman's proposal:

"The Cambrian radiation marks the unique event when the earth's biota shifted from one with few animal species to one rich in species that comprised diverse ecological communities. The event began around 540 million years ago and spanned roughly 20 million years; during this interval nearly all of the major animal groups appeared in the fossil record. There were also dramatic increases in the rates of diversification of already existing microfossil groups and rapid rates of evolution in the newly emerging animals. Because it marks the first appearance of diverse communities of animals, the Cambrian radiation is ideally suited as a paleontological system for studying the relationship between the early organization of ecological communities and the evolution of animals."