Two faculty appointed to named professorships
By Daniel J. Fitzgibbons
Two faculty members were appointed to named professorships by President Jack M. Wilson following the Nov. 16 meeting of the Board of Trustees at the Mullins Center. Lynne Baker, philosophy, was appointed a Distinguished Professor and Vincent Rotello was named to the Charles A. Goessmann Chair in Chemistry.
The designations recognize them for outstanding academic distinction. They were recommended for the honors by Chancellor John V. Lombardi and Charlena Seymour, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs.
According to a recommendation for the appointment by her dean, Baker’s scholarship is “outstanding, as is her teaching and her service to the scholarly community. Her productivity is extraordinary, as is her visibility in the national and international philosophical world … she is a role model in a particularly male-dominated field.”
A member of the Philosophy Department since 1989, Baker is the author of four books and more than 75 book chapters or journal articles, many published in peer-reviewed journals such as Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Nous and Philosophical Studies. She has also contributed to some of the most important reference works in her field, including the Oxford Companion to the Philosophy of Mind and the Oxford Handbook for Philosophy of Religion. Baker also has the distinction of having a volume devoted to considerations of her work, Explaining Beliefs: Lynne Rudder Baker and her Critics. As her department head noted, this is “an honor that only a handful of (living) philosophers have attained.”
Baker has given nearly 150 presentations at national and international conferences, including the prestigious Gifford Lecture at Glasgow University in 2001. Next month, she will present a Distinguished Faculty Lecture.
Baker received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. She taught at Mary Baldwin College and Middlebury College before coming to UMass Amherst.
Rotello, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale University, joined the Chemistry Department in 1993 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He is “an internationally recognized leader in the fields of molecular recognition, supramolecular chemistry and the design and synthesis of nanoscale systems,” according to his department head.
Rotello’s research is highly interdisciplinary and is expected to lead to advances in catalysis, medical therapy, drug delivery and nanoscale electronics. Since joining the faculty, he has written 134 publications and a book. He has also attracted about $5 million in external funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Army Research Office. In their recommendation, the chancellor and provost also cited Rotello as an “extraordinary teacher, research mentor and role model.”
The quality of Rotello’s research has been recognized with a number of major honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, the Camille Dreyfuss Teacher-Scholar Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation, an Alfred Sloan Fellowship and a Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship from UMass Amherst.
The Charles A. Goessmann Chair in Chemistry was established in 1911 and carries the prestige of being the oldest named professorship at UMass Amherst. The chair is named for the legendary founder of the chemistry department at Massachusetts Agricultural College. The second professor hired at MAC in the late 1800s, Goessmann single-handedly provided all instruction in chemistry and chemical physics for 15 years.
November 16, 2005.
E-mail story to a friend
Printer-friendly version
/more talking points/
