Charles Rosenblatt was giving a lecture in his Classical Mechanics course when he learned that he had won a Faculty Distinguished Research Award. Photo by Daniel Milner.
Charles Rosenblatt, Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor in the Department of Physics, was one of six recipients of the university’s Faculty Distinguished Research Award this fall. The newly established prize recognizes faculty members’ contributions to their fields and to Case Western Reserve’s reputation as a research institution.
A faculty member since 1987, Rosenblatt was nominated by colleague and frequent collaborator Philip Taylor, Distinguished University Professor and Perkins Professor of Physics. “It is my feeling,” Taylor wrote, “that there are very few on our campus who have a continuing record of achievements to match his.”
Rosenblatt specializes in the study of soft condensed matter—materials that are highly responsive to external stimuli. These include ordinary liquids, biomaterials, polymers and liquid crystals. His research has led to four patents and almost 200 refereed publications. This body of work, Taylor wrote, “has had a far-reaching impact on the scientific and technological communities.”
Rosenblatt is known both for his discoveries about materials and for his development of innovative techniques to study them. A liquid crystal display technology he invented with physics colleague Rolfe Petschek was the university’s biggest royalty income generator during the 1990s.
For more than 28 years, Rosenblatt has received uninterrupted single-investigator research funding from the National Science Foundation’s Solid State and Materials Chemistry program. Additional support has come from the Department of Energy, NASA, the state of Ohio and other sources. During the course of his career, more than 70 percent of his grant proposals have been funded—an extraordinary success rate, Taylor says, and a major contributor to Rosenblatt’s research productivity.
The selection of recipients of the Faculty Distinguished Research Award is based in part on their outstanding national and international reputations. Rosenblatt established himself as a leading researcher relatively early in his career. He was elected to the board of directors of the International Liquid Crystal Society at age 39—the youngest member ever. Four years later, he was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Rosenblatt’s nomination for the university award drew letters of support from colleagues in Britain, Hong Kong and Ukraine as well as the United States. Yuri Reznikov of the Institute of Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, praised Rosenblatt’s extensive efforts “to create a real worldwide community of scientists working in the liquid crystal field.”
Since 2005, Rosenblatt has forged a relationship between Case Western Reserve and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, involving research collaborations and a student exchange program. He has received two travel grants, totaling $415,000, from the French Foreign Ministry’s Partner University Fund to work with physicists Pierre Carlès and Emmanuelle Lacaze. In 2010, he spent five months in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar, and he remains engaged in what he calls his struggle to learn la langue française.
University President Barbara Snyder and Provost William “Bud” Baeslack presented the faculty research award to Rosenblatt during a surprise visit to his Classical Mechanics class. “I was flummoxed,” he recalls. “During the presentation, I blurted out, ‘Everybody gets an A!’ I did have to backtrack on that.”
Former students of Professor Emeritus Edward Olszewski have published a collection of essays in his honor.
Jennifer Finkel (GRS ’98, ’05) speaks fondly of her former advisor, Professor Emeritus Edward J. Olszewski—but not just for his formal involvement in her education.
“He was so incredibly supportive and involved, and recognized how special the period of graduate school was,” she says. “He’d create these opportunities in his home—these salons where we would talk among our peers.”
Olszewski, a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art, was a faculty member in the Department of Art History and Art for almost 40 years. As he approached retirement in 2010, Finkel and others affiliated with the department knew they wanted to honor him.
“It began with a meeting of the Friends of Art, sitting around Lee Warshawsky’s dining room table, scheming behind Dr. Olszewski’s back,” recalls Finkel, who is now curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Clinic. “One portion was a travel fund in his name—he was always a proponent of travel and firsthand object research.” Warshawsky, president of the Friends of Art, spearheaded a successful campaign to endow the fund.
“Another portion was to throw a party for him,” Finkel says. “I remember it was [Associate Professor] Anne Helmreich who suggested creating a Festschrift.”
Many of the people around the table didn’t know what a Festschrift was—a publication by colleagues and former students in honor of a distinguished scholar.
Thus was born Renaissance Studies: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Edward J. Olszewski, which has just been published by Peter Lang. Edited by Finkel, Michael Morford (GRS ’09) and Dena Woodall (GRS ’08), the book consists of eight papers written by Olszewski’s former doctoral students and based on work developed for dissertations or seminars tied to the professor emeritus. Four of the papers are about Michelangelo, and all are inspired by what Finkel calls Olszewski’s “passion projects” as a teacher and scholar.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to the volume are Christine Corretti (GRS ’11), Karen Edwards (GRS ’02, ’07), Rachel Geschwind (GRS ’11), Henrietta Silberger (GRS ’99) and Holly Witchey (GRS ’86, ’90).
“Dr. Olszewski used to say to me, ‘When are you going to publish something from your dissertation?’” Finkel says. “With this book, we’re publishing—and paying a very nice tribute to him.”
Researchers affiliated with the Department of Physics have received significant state and federal funding in support of their work in two areas: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and optical data storage.
Michael Martens. Photo by Arianna Wage.
The Ohio Third Frontier has awarded a $3 million grant to a research team led by principal investigator Michael Martens, associate professor of physics. The team also includes Robert Brown, Distinguished University Professor and Institute Professor, and senior research associates Tanvir Baig and Robert Deissler. The physicists have launched joint projects with two Ohio firms to commercialize new MRI technologies.
For the first project, Martens and his colleagues are working with Quality Electrodynamics (QED), a Mayfield, Ohio, company founded by Hiroyuki Fujita (GRS ’98), to develop an MRI system that will image breast tissue and guide a biopsy needle toward areas that appear potentially cancerous.
For their second project, they are helping Hyper Tech Research of Columbus, Ohio, develop an MRI magnet made of magnesium diboride (MgB2), a new superconducting material. In order to supercool the MRI magnets currently in use, 2,000 liters of increasingly expensive liquid helium are needed. With the new magnet, however, only a few liters may be required.
In addition to the Ohio Third Frontier grant, Martens’ team has received nearly $600,000 from the National Science Foundation for related MgB2 research.
“These are powerful collaborations between industry and academia,” Martens said in an interview with The Daily, the university’s online newsletter. The two companies “have the motivation and experience in products, and we have an understanding of the underlying physics and calculation techniques.”
The collaborations are further strengthened, Martens says, by the support of Case Western Reserve’s Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Program (STEP), led by Executive Director Ed Caner.
The Ohio Third Frontier has also provided $100,000 to Folio Photonics, a startup founded by Kenneth Singer, the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics. The grant will fund development of a prototype optical data storage disc that would be cheaper and easier to use than traditional archival magnetic tapes or discs.
Joseph F. Fagan III, the Leffingwell Professor of Psychology and a leading researcher on infant intelligence, died Aug. 10 at age 71. A member of the Case Western Reserve faculty since 1968, he served as chair of the Department of Psychology from 1990 to 1995.
In a large and influential body of work, Fagan argued against the traditional view of intelligence as “how much one knows.” Instead, he defined intelligence as “how well one processes” information to create knowledge. This processing ability, he wrote, is influenced by both genetics and the environment.
By testing the information-processing skills of infants, Fagan showed that it was possible to identify mental disabilities within the first year of life, and thus “allow a child to qualify quickly for remedial programs.” Such testing also led to the discovery of environmental agents that can cause mental disabilities.
In 2009, Fagan received the Mensa Education and Research Foundation Award for Excellence in Research. He was also named a fellow of the American Psychological Society, among other honors.
Fagan was equally well regarded for his contributions as a mentor and an educator. For nearly 15 years, he mentored Cleveland-area minority students in the Bridges to Success in the Sciences program based at Cuyahoga Community College. Also for many years, he taught a grant-writing course for graduate students and faculty members at Case Western Reserve; the funding secured by those who took the course totaled millions of dollars.
“He was an outstanding scientist and a wonderful human being with a sense of humor that I always appreciated,” Dean Cyrus C. Taylor told The Daily. “I was always particularly impressed with how his former students remember him, recalling with gratitude how he had changed their lives, shaping in profound ways who they had become.”
Antonio Candau. Photo by Daniel Milner.
Antonio Candau, who served as chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures until last summer, died Sept. 17 at age 51.
A specialist in Spanish literature and culture, Candau joined the Case Western Reserve faculty as an associate professor in 2001. He published two books, the first on the contemporary novelist José Maria Merino, and the second on literary depictions of Spain’s provincial towns. In recent years, he was at work on another book—his first in English—examining how Spanish poets and novelists since the 19th century have portrayed urban life.
A native of Valladolid, a Castilian city northwest of Madrid, Candau was in his early 20s when he met his future wife, Cynthia Barbaro, who was an American college student spending her junior year in Spain. Soon, as he recalled in a 2009 profile in art/sci, he was taking English classes and building his vocabulary by listening to American music. He came to the United States to earn a doctorate in Spanish literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
As a teacher, Candau drew on his own experience mastering a second language. He encouraged his students to make the effort to express themselves even when their ideas outran their vocabularies. When, in his literature classes, students became disheartened by the sheer number of words they didn’t know, he would say, “You have to use what you do know as stepping-stones to try to make as much sense of the text as possible. You have to focus on the path instead of the obstacles.”
Candau continued teaching until shortly before his death because he “didn’t want to miss any chance to teach such inspiring students,” Associate Professor Linda Ehrlich told The Daily. “Antonio was a prince, and it’s sad when such a fine person dies so young. But his legacy is one of kindness, enthusiasm and good humor.”
Karen Beckwith, the Flora Stone Mather Professor in the Department of Political Science, was selected for an award from the Fulbright Scholar Program. She will spend six months in the United Kingdom examining how the political process can create policies favorable to women.
John Broich, assistant professor in the Department of History, has published London, Water and the Making of the Modern City.
Ralph Harvey, associate professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, was elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Emmitt Jolly, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, was selected for the Nsoroma Science Award, which honors achievements in an industry addressing science, by the Cleveland chapter of the National Technical Association.
Ellen G. Landau, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emerita of the Humanities, has published Mexico and American Modernism (Yale University Press).
Kenneth Ledford, associate professor in the Department of History and co-director of the Max Kade Center for German Studies, was elected to the board of directors of the Ohio Humanities Council.
John D. Protasiewicz, professor and associate chair in the Department of Chemistry, has been selected as a member of the 2013 class of American Chemical Society Fellows.
Amy Przeworski, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, has been awarded the 2013 John and Polly Sparks Early Career Grant from the American Psychological Foundation.
Cheryl Toman, associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, is the editor of Defying the Global Language, a volume of essays on the changing field of ethnic studies.
Thrity Umrigar, associate professor in the Department of English, won a Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian General Fiction category for her novel The World We Found.
Frank Manzella, a doctoral student in medical anthropology, has received a prestigious David L. Boren Fellowship, administered by the National Security Education Program.
Two recent graduates, Andrea Fidler (CWR ’13) and Andrew Flagg (CWR ’13), and Alanna Ropchock, a fourth-year doctoral student in musicology, have been selected as Fulbright Scholars.