Professor of Distinction

Paul Sutter honored as 2024 Professor of Distinction

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 21:28:50 +0000

Paul Sutter honored as 2024 Professor of Distinction Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/18/2024 - 15:28

College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize history professor’s service, teaching and research with the award

Paul Sutter, a �鶹��Ƶ professor of history, has been named the 2024 College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his exceptional service, teaching and research.

The college presents this prestigious award annually to current faculty members who are scholars and artists of national and international renown and who are recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent. Honorees hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

“Being named a Professor of Distinction is a career honor, and I am deeply appreciative of my wonderful colleagues in the History Department who nominated me for this award, and those around campus who supported my nomination,” Sutter notes.

Sutter’s research focus is U.S. and global environmental history. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (2015).

CU Boulder Professor Paul Sutter is the author of many accalimed essays and books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South.

In Driven Wild, Sutter details an aspect of his longtime intellectual fascination with wilderness and U.S. environmental history: “Historians had long studied the centrality of the wilderness idea in American history, from its importation as a filter for viewing the colonial landscape to its role as a shibboleth of the postwar environmental movement, and I was fascinated by the same questions that preoccupied many of these scholars: How was it that a nation founded upon an antipathy for the wilderness had come to cherish and protect it? What had produced this intellectual and cultural sea change?”

In addition, Sutter is the co-author of The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard Neel Approach (with Leon Neel and Albert Way, 2010), and the co-editor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (with Christopher Manganiello, 2009) and Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast (with Paul Pressly, 2018).

His current book project, Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904-1914, is an environmental and public health history of the construction of the Panama Canal.

In addition to his books, Sutter has also written a number of influential essays on environmental historiography, including a state-of-the-field essay in the Journal of American History (June 2013), and he is the series editor for Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, published by the University of Washington Press. He has received major fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the National Humanities Center.

Sutter earned his BA in American studies from Hamilton College and his PhD from the University of Kansas. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia from 1997 to 2000 and a member of the History Department at the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2009. He joined CU Boulder as an associate professor of history in 2009 and was named professor in 2016.

Sutter served as Department of History chair from 2017-2021. He is a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Studies and in the Center of the American West, and he has just joined the Advisory Board of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.

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College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize history professor’s service, teaching and research with the award.

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Outstanding prof touts research of ‘weird’ systems

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 20:56:32 +0000

Outstanding prof touts research of ‘weird’ systems Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/15/2023 - 13:56

Karolin Luger is one of a select group of professors to be recognized as a Distinguished Professor, the highest honor bestowed upon faculty members

With a vote by the CU Board of Regents, the University of Colorado recently recognized Karolin Luger as a Distinguished Professor—the highest honor bestowed upon faculty across the system’s four campuses.

Distinguished Professors are tenured faculty members who demonstrate exemplary performance in research or creative work; a record of excellence in promoting learning and student attainment of knowledge and skills; and outstanding service to the profession, the university and its affiliates. Including this year’s honorees, 138 have been named since inception of the title in 1977.

Luger, the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Endowed Chair of Biochemistry, Department of Biochemistry, �鶹��Ƶ, is an internationally recognized researcher who joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2015.

She has received many honors, including a 2005 appointment to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017) and the National Academy of Sciences (2018).

Karolin Luger specializes in cell signaling, molecular biophysics, nucleic acids, proteins & enzymology, and structural biology.

Her work has yielded insights into the impact of nucleosomes on gene transcription, DNA replication and repair and other DNA-templated processes.

Luger recently answered five questions about the nature of her work, what she is most proud of during her time at CU Boulder, and her initial reaction to being named as a Distinguished Professor. Her responses follow: 

Question: If a group of first-year students were to ask you why they should understand chromatin and/or the structural biology of the genome organization, what would you tell them?

Luger: The so-called blueprint of life (the ‘genome’) is an incredibly long and thin thread with no distinctive features. Every cell in our bodies contains the same blueprint.

The information stored on very different regions of that thread must be ‘transcribed and translated’ in a precise manner. A liver cell, for example, will need to access very specific areas of the genome in a precisely orchestrated manner, and completely different regions might be needed in a neuron.

How does a cell ‘know’ which regions to find, and how does it find it? (akin to finding 35 numbered needles in a very large haystack, in the precise order and in a short time). Bad things happen if this doesn’t work exactly the way it is supposed to work.

We study how the genome is organized and ‘labeled’ to allow this readout to happen, and how it is organized in three dimensions. We believe that by understanding how something looks like we will understand how it works.

Question: If there were just one thing you could convey to people about your research, what would it be?

Luger: We have made very surprising discoveries by looking in unusual (and weird) systems. For example, we study giant viruses that turn amoebae to ‘stone,’ or bacteria that literally burrow into other bacteria and eat them from the inside.

Arguably, this has no relevance to human health, but we made very surprising discoveries that allow us to better understand how the human genome works. This is my big shoutout for ‘basic’ research.

There is a lot of urgency to developing the next drug, or to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, but I believe that stepping back a bit and study systems that are off-the-beaten track can be hugely informative and open entire new fields. Plus, it is fun!

Question: What are you most proud of during your time with the university? And, what is the best thing about being a professor at CU Boulder?

Luger: I am most proud of having brought a Titan Krios cryo electron microscope to CU Boulder through combined money from HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and CU Boulder.

I established a very productive facility that serves the entire region. This (very expensive) instrument is essential for structural biologists such as myself to observe molecular structures. It was a lot of work to get this instrument funded and operational, and to establish what is now the BioKEM facility www.colorado.edu/facility/biokem/. This facility is used by about 10 labs at CU Boulder.

It is now one of the highest-performing instruments in the world, and, because it is the only one in a wide swath of the country, it has had a huge ripple effect way beyond CU Boulder. We have recently been able to purchase a smaller TEM (transcription electron microscopy) to alleviate bottlenecks that arose because of the success of the Krios.

I believe this really has helped CU to retain its rightful place at the forefront of molecular biology and biophysics and to take full advantage of the ‘resolution revolution’ in cryoEM. It has also brought in a lot of external funding, so it’s really a win-win.

The best thing about being a prof at CU Boulder is the collegial work environment. We all cheer for each other’s successes, and we bring out the best in each other. This is pervasive at all levels, all the way to undergraduate researchers.

I also love the strong commitment to undergraduate education. CU is a very pleasant place to work, and it allows us to focus on the important things such as science, teaching, and mentoring, and not waste any time on ‘politics.’

Question: What was your initial reaction to being named a Distinguished Professor?

Luger: Very humbled, because I feel that many of my colleagues are much more distinguished. Also, grateful to my colleagues who took the time to assemble the nomination package—this is a lot of work! And most importantly, gratitude to my current and past lab members, whose hard work and creativity is really what made this happen.

Question: Outside of the university, what are a few of your favorite of your favorite activities?

Luger: Long, grueling hikes in the Rocky Mountains (or really any mountains), summer, winter, spring and fall, I love them all. Playing the piano (badly), and books, always.

Karolin Luger is one of a select group of professors to be recognized as a Distinguished Professor, the highest honor bestowed upon faculty members.

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Warren Motte named college professor of distinction

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 22:04:34 +0000

Warren Motte named college professor of distinction Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2016 - 16:04

Laura Kriho

Honoree's public lecture to focus on the pleasures and benefits of immersing ourselves in a world of fiction

Warren F. Motte Jr., professor of French and comparative literature at the �鶹��Ƶ, has been named the 2016 Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his exceptional service, teaching and research.

Warren F. Motte, Jr. (right) receives his medal from Jeffrey Richards, Honorary Consul of France (left) at a ceremony on Sept. 17, 2015. Photo by Laura Kriho.

This highly revered title is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international acclaim whose college peers also recognize as exceptionally talented teachers and colleagues. Honorees of this award hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

Motte will be honored on Wednesday, Sept. 21, in the Old Main Chapel on campus. He will give a lecture titled “Division and Multiplication” from 4 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. A reception in the CU Heritage Center Museum on the third floor of Old Main will follow the presentation at 4:30 p.m.

This event is free and open to the public.

Motte received an A.B. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, a Maîtrise in Anglo-American Literature from the Université de Bordeaux, and an AM and PhD in French Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

He came to CU in 1987 as an associate professor, having spent the first five years of his career at the University of Nebraska. As a professor of French and comparative literature, he specializes in contemporary writing, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question.

He is the author of The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec (1984), Questioning Edmond Jabès (1990), Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (1995), Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (1999), Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008) and Mirror Gazing (2014).

He is the editor of nine other volumes, and he serves on a variety of editorial boards and advisory committees, in the United States and in France.

He has received many awards for teaching, service and scholarship. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms. This honorific distinction was given to Motte for his extensive efforts to promote French language and culture in the United States.

Motte describes his “Division and Multiplication” lecture as an examination of the pleasure of losing oneself in mild abstraction while reading works of fiction. He states:

“It is useful to realize that we are far more supple, more tolerant, more agile, more playful when we approach a fictional world than we typically are when we grapple with the phenomenal world. It also helps to recognize that we can immerse ourselves up to our necks in fiction, while never abdicating our critical faculties, that the one gesture does not debilitate the other. To the contrary, immersion actuates our critical sense, and our critical sense stokes our desire to inhabit the fictional world.”

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