Hilldale faculty award recipients named
Four faculty members have been chosen to receive this year’s Hilldale Awards for major achievements in teaching, research and service.
Developed in 1987 for former Chancellor Irving Shain, the Hilldale Awards are given to a top professor in four divisions of the university: physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences and humanities. Recipients are nominated by their peers and selected by the executive committee in their faculty division.
Winners are awarded a stipend of $7,500 from the Hilldale Fund, which receives income from the operation of the Hilldale Shopping Center. This year’s recipients are:
Ronald Wallace
Halls-Bascom Professor of English
Wallace is a nationally acclaimed poet and the author of more than 600 poems published in virtually every important literary journal in the nation, including The New Yorker and The Atlantic. His six full-length collections of poetry and five chapbooks of poetry and fiction have won him critical accolades. His work has been called “exceptionally finished” and “exuberantly alive.”
When Wallace joined the UW–Madison English faculty in 1972, there were few opportunities for creative writers on campus. He proceeded to design the English major with a creative writing emphasis and helped found the Madison Review literary magazine, the Visiting Writers Readings and Residencies Series, and the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry Series (in conjunction with the UW Press). He has judged many regional creative writing competitions and served on the Wisconsin Arts Board’s Creative Writing Grant Screening Committee.
As a teacher he has received several perfect scores in student evaluations and has won the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the Wisconsin Student Association’s Teaching Award.
Wallace grew up in St. Louis and earned his bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster and doctorate from the University of Michigan.
Charles R. Bentley
A.P. Crary Professor of Geophysics
As a glaciologist, Bentley has been instrumental to modern scientific exploration of Antarctica. By adapting and applying geophysical techniques, sometimes under arduous conditions (one sojourn lasted more than two years), he has studied broadly the characteristics of the Antarctic ice sheet and the continent beneath. Two features his early traverse party discovered are named for him: Mount Bentley, in the Sentinel Range, and the Bentley Subglacial Trench, perhaps the deepest ice region in the world. In 1990 he received the International Glaciological Society’s highest award, the Seligman Crystal, for being “one of the pioneers who laid the foundations for current work on the ice sheet.”
Since 1961 he has taught a dozen courses ranging from elementary oceanography to seminars in glaciology and theoretical geophysics. The involvement of graduate students in his Antarctic field and laboratory work has resulted in more than 200 research publications, and many of those students now have successful careers in geophysics and glaciology.
Bentley has long been active in national and international organizations, especially the Polar Research Board of the National Research Council and the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. He also has served on several UW–Madison committees and in the Faculty Senate.
Born in Rochester, N.Y., Bentley received his bachelor’s degree from Yale and his doctorate from Columbia.
Ray F. Evert
Katherine Esau Professor of Botany and Plant Pathology
Evert is an internationally distinguished plant anatomist and the world’s authority on phloem, the tissue that conducts sugars in plants. He is an accomplished structural botanist who expands the significance of his work by relating it to physiology. He has published nearly 200 articles, reviews and book chapters, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A Guggenheim Fellow in 1965-66, Evert was also the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1974-75.
He is a recipient of the Steiger Award for Excellence in Teaching and has been a co- author of an introductory textbook, Biology of Plants, through five editions over 20 years. It is considered the leading text of its kind in the United States and has been translated into five languages.
Evert, a UW–Madison faculty member since 1960, has served three times as chair of the Department of Botany and on numerous college and university committees. He also has served on the examining board of the Graduate Record Exam and as president of the Botanical Society of America, from which he received its Merit Award in 1982.
He grew up in Mt. Carmel, Pa., and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Penn State and his doctorate at UC-Davis.
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Sir Frederic C. Bartlett Professor of Psychology
Gernsbacher investigates how humans process language. She has challenged the view that language processing involves language-specific mechanisms by proposing that, instead, it draws on general cognitive processes. Her work has made her a central figure in the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Its real-world application is so great that her research was covered in a Newsweek article.
Since arriving at UW–Madison in 1992, Gernsbacher has taught 19 courses in 10 terms and each term has garnered some of the highest student evaluations in the department. Soon after coming to the university, she organized a teaching workshop to introduce faculty and students to the “inquiry mode” of teaching, which emphasizes active problem-solving inquiry and learning through writing.
Gernsbacher currently holds an elected office in every professional organization in her field, a total of six. Her university-level committee work has included the Social Studies Divisional Committee and the Graduate School Research Committee. She has organized three invited international conferences for leading scholars in psycholinguistics to present their latest research.
A native of Dallas, Texas, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Texas, master’s from the University of Texas at Dallas and doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin.