Three faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are this year’s new Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors.
Jeffrey D. Fisher in psychology, Harry A. Frank in chemistry, and Johann Peter Gogarten in molecular and cell biology all earned the distinction, which is the University’s highest award for faculty excellence in research, teaching, and service.
“These are three outstanding researchers and teachers who have made substantial contributions to their fields and mentored a new generation of scientists,” says Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “They set the standard for the College’s mission of excellence in teaching, research, and service.”
All three are known internationally for their research.
Fisher is the founding director of the Center for Health, Intervention and Prevention (CHIP) at UConn, an interdisciplinary center formed in 2002 that has attracted more than $67 million in external funding. CHIP researchers study the dynamics of health risk behavior and how to change it. They initially focused on HIV/AIDS but have expanded their research to cover alcohol and substance abuse, sexual behavior, medication adherence, obesity, cancer, autism, health communication marketing, and virtual reality as a method to study health behavior.
Their work and theory-based health behavior interventions span the globe, from China to Nigeria, South Africa, and Vietnam. Fisher himself, working with colleagues, has been influential in public health interventions aimed at curbing the HIV epidemic. He has been the principal investigator for $25 million in major grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health since the late 1980s.
His work since 1987 has focused on creating and testing models for understanding the dynamics of HIV-risk and prevention behavior and designing interventions to change risky behavior, which about a third of HIV-positive patients engage in. The Options model developed by Fisher and his colleagues, based on a collaboration among health care providers, psychologists, and HIV-positive patients, is a protocol for talking to HIV-positive patients about their behavior and determining dynamics for changing it. With NIMH funding, it is being tried at 16 sites in South Africa.
Seven of his graduate students have won National Institute of Mental Health National Research Service Awards (NIMH NRSA), which provide full funding for their graduate studies and research expenses.
Frank is recognized as a leading authority on carotenoids, molecules that have fundamental scientific interest and are commercially important in the vitamin, aquaculture, and poultry industries. His research has revealed new information about how carotenoids work as light-harvesting pigments and as biological colorants in plants, crustaceans, and birds.
He has published more than 150 scientific papers and reviews and was the president of the International Carotenoid Society from 2002 to 2005. His work is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.
He was a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1995, a visiting scientist at the Centre d’Etudes de Saclay, France in 1987, and a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 2003. He has advised 17 Ph.D. and nine MS students and received the University’s Honors Teacher and Mentor Award for 2002-2003. He has also overseen undergraduate research projects, and has coauthored their publications in major international chemistry journals.
For more than five years, Frank was an associate dean of CLAS. This spring he won the UConn American Association of University Professors’ Research Excellence Award.
Gogarten, who just returned from a sabbatical leave at Tel Aviv University in Israel as a Fulbright Scholar, is a leader in studying the evolution of life, using computational methods for DNA and protein sequence analysis.
He was among the first to discover the importance to evolution of “horizontal gene transfer,” that is, gene transfer between unrelated microorganisms. This method of gene transfer has led some to suggest that the “Tree of Life” image associated with the transfer of genes from one generation to the next might be replaced with the image of a network, showing the more complicated pathways of gene transfer.
Gogarten has received more than $5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation and the NASA Exobiology Program, and he has published more than 120 articles and co-edited three books.
Ten of his graduate students have received Ph.D.’s and now hold prestigious positions in their field. His current lab group includes two undergraduates, four Ph.D. candidates, and two post-doctoral fellows.
