Four faculty members win Hilldale Awards

The prestigious Hilldale Awards, which annually recognize excellence in teaching, research and service, have been awarded to four faculty members at UW–Madison.

The awards honor top professors in four university divisions: arts and humanities, social sciences, physical sciences and biological sciences. Recipients receive $7,500.

First given in 1987, the awards are made possible by the Hilldale Fund, which has received income from the operation of the Hilldale Shopping mall. This year’s awards were presented at the Faculty Senate meeting on May 3. The recipients are:

Judith Walzer Leavitt, the Ruth Bleier WARF professor of medical history, history of science and women’s studies.

Leavitt has served on the faculty for 28 years, and her work brings insights and approaches from women’s studies and social history to the field of medical history. Her recent analyses of the response to SARS and proposals for smallpox vaccination show a commitment to using history to shed light on contemporary health-care policy.

She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the Brittingham Trust, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the UW Graduate School and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. She was winner of the UW Medical School’s 1999 Folkert Belzer Lifetime Achievement Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Between 2000-02, she served as president of the American Association of the History of Medicine.

Leavitt is the author of three books, “The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform,” “Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950,” and “Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health.” She is currently working on a first-ever history of fathers and childbirth.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in social science from Antioch College, and master’s and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Chicago.

Joel Rogers, professor of law, political science and sociology, and founder and director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS).

Rogers joined the faculty in 1987 and has often been described as “the Wisconsin Idea in action.” COWS, a research and policy center on regional economic development, has used Wisconsin as a test bed for several innovations in development practice that have since become national policy or recognized “best practices.” Examples include industry consortia to solve collective action problems in workforce training and modernization; the use of them to promote low-wage workers into family-supporting jobs; and the “high road vs. low road” frame for assessing firm behavior and public development efforts.

Rogers is the author of more than 200 articles and books on democratic theory, American politics and comparative public policy. He is a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Newsweek recently identified him as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century.

Rogers earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, philosophy and political science at Yale College, a law degree at Yale Law School, and master’s and doctoral degrees in politics at Princeton University.

Thomas A. Lipo, W.W. Grainger Professor of Power Electronics and Electrical Machines.

Lipo joined the faculty in electrical and computer engineering in 1981, and has pioneered new methods for analysis, design and computer simulation that underlie nearly all of the high-power, solid-state converter systems used in heavy industry today. Lipo’s work has facilitated variable-speed drive designs that have revolutionized industrial processes, many of which are critical to the state and national economy.

His commitment to the Wisconsin Idea was demonstrated in his co-founding of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium in 1981. He is also director of the Wisconsin Power Electronics Research Center.

In 2002, Lipo was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom. Of the academy’s more than 1,000 members, only about 80 reside outside the United Kingdom. Since 1987, he has been a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

He is author or co-author of more than 380 technical papers and holds more than 30 U.S. patents. In addition, he has graduated nearly 40 doctoral students and more than 45 master’s students.
Lipo earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Marquette University, and completed his doctorate at UW–Madison.

Elizabeth Craig, Steenbock Professor of Microbiological Sciences in the Department of Biochemistry.

Craig has been a member of the faculty since 1979, and also served as chair of the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry from 1996-2002.

Her work on protein folding and proteins involved in that process led to her election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. She was also selected to the American Academy of Microbiology.

During her career, Craig has been a leader in efforts to understand a class of proteins known as molecular chaperones. These proteins aid in the important processes of folding and translocation of newly synthesized proteins in all organisms. A number of genetic diseases, including Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and Creutzfeldt Jacob diseases are caused by defects in protein folding.
She held the WARF (Elizabeth Cavert Miller) professorship from 1992-97 and the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship from 1985-90.

Craig earned a bachelor’s degree in bacteriology at the University of Rhode Island and a doctorate in microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine.