1999-2000 UFRF Professors Named
This article was originally published in the September 1999 issue of CLASnotes.
The University of Florida Research Foundation (UFRF) recently announced its third annual class of 30 UF Research Foundation Professors. The three-year awards, designed to recognize excellence in research, include a $5,000 annual salary supplement and a $3,000 research grant. Six of this year's awards went to CLAS faculty (see below).
UFRF professors are chosen based on recommendations from department chairs, a personal statement and an evaluation of their recent research productivity, measured by such criteria as publications in books and scholarly journals, external funding and development of intellectual property. The professorships are funded from the university's share of royalty and licensing income on UF-generated products like Gatorade and Trusopt (a glaucoma treatment). UFRF currently manages more than 800 grants and 60 licensed technologies and plans to fund a total of up to 90 active professorships at any given time.
Karen Bjorndal
Karen A. Bjorndal is a professor of zoology and Director of the Archie
Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research (ACCSTR). She is an expert in sea turtle
biology and in the nutritional ecology of herbivores. She has edited six
books and published over 80 peer-reviewed papers. The ACCSTR has a strong
multidisciplinary research program on the biology and conservation of sea
turtles that addresses questions from the molecular level to the ecosystem
level. This wide range of research depends on multidisciplinary collaborations
with faculty throughout UF and a strong international network of biologists.
Jim Channell
Jim Channell (Geological Sciences) studies the record of the ancient geomagnetic field in rocks and sediments. He has used "paleomagnetic" methods to reconstruct the past position of continents and continental fragments in the Alpine mountain belts, from southern Italy to eastern Turkey. He has been prominent in the correlation of fossil events to the polarity record of the geomagnetic field, work that has helped to refine geologic time scales. After cruises to the high latitude North Atlantic (1995) and the sub-Antarctic South Atlantic (1997/1998), Channell is now using new methods based on geomagnetic paleointensity to correlate (date) "recent" sediments (less than ~2 million years old).
Jaber Gubrium
Jaber
F. Gubrium (Sociology) is one of the world's leading qualitative
methodologists. He works at the border of narrative analysis and ethnography,
and has developed a constructionist perspective on institutional culture.
He is currently doing research on institutional identity, especially
as that applies in aging, family life, health care environments, and
in self-help groups. Gubrium is the author of over 20 books, including
his most recent, The Self We Live
By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World (2000). He is nearing completion
of a companion volume Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern
World, also by Oxford.
John Moore
John H. Moore (Anthropology) is an expert on the kinship and demography of hunting and gathering societies, especially those which have existed in North America. He has published nearly a hundred books, monographs and articles and has been elected Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Societies. He has conducted fieldwork with more than twenty tribal nations, especially the Cheyennes and Mvskoke Creeks. A past Chair of the Anthropology Department, Moore is currently Chair of the North American Committee of the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Mark Reid
Mark A. Reid is a professor of English and Film Studies. His current research includes working with recent French fiction films that depict two generations of African diasporic communities in France. He is particularly interested in the way fiction films use music, dress and cinematographic techniques to portray the social integration of two formerly colonized African groups-Arabs from North Africa and Blacks from West Africa. Reid is also interested how these same films present the integration of the Francophone Afro-Caribbeans who settled in metropolitan France after World War II.
John Reynolds
John R. Reynolds, a professor of chemistry with expertise in polymer chemistry, is an international leader in the field of electrically conducting and electroactive conjugated polymers. His research is focussed on the development of new polymers by manipulating their fundamental organic structure in order to control their ultimate properties. His research methodology spans across molecular and polymer design, synthesis, and structure, along with the use of numerous characterization methods to investigate optical, electrical and electrochemical properties. Reynolds has published over 100 scientific papers and recently served as co-editor of the "Handbook of Conducting Polymers" (1998).
