Three Ohio State faculty members named Huber Fellows

COLUMBUS -- The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) has selected three Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellows for 2005, the seventh year of the program.

This year’s Huber Faculty Fellows are John P. Bruno, professor in the Department of Psychology, Mei-Po Kwan, professor in the Department of Geography, and David Jacobs, professor in the Department of Sociology. Each will receive an annual cash award of $5,000 each year for three years to further their research programs.

The program acknowledges and rewards the strongest scholars on the SBS faculty who don’t already hold named chairs or haven’t received University Distinguished Scholar or Distinguished University Professor awards. It is named in honor of Joan Huber, former dean of SBS (1984-1992), who set the highest standards for faculty in SBS.

Below is information about this year’s recipients.

• John P. Bruno, who joined the Department of Psychology in 1986, has made significant contributions to several areas of psychobiological research. Early in his career, he examined how age can influence the capacity of the nervous system to recover after trauma to the brain. His research demonstrated that the developing brain could recover from certain types of brain damage better than a mature or aged brain could. Recently, his work has focused on the neurobiological and cognitive dysfunctions associated with disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, drug addiction and schizophrenia. Throughout his career, Bruno has written more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles. His reputation in the field has been acknowledged in many ways, including 28 years of continuous federal funding for his research and his election as president of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Neuroscience, Cell Biology and Neuroanatomy.

• David Jacobs, who joined the Sociology faculty in 1997, is a renowned contributor in the areas of criminology and political sociology. He has focused on studying how political factors and politically motivated attempts to control crime affect a variety of criminal justice outcomes, such as support for capital punishment, law enforcement strength, the use of deadly force, correctional expenditures, and incarceration rates. He has an outstanding record of publication in the most highly visible journals in sociology, with 22 publications in the discipline’s flagship general journals alone. His current research on “Survival on Death Row” is sponsored by a multi-year National Science Foundation grant in collaboration with Professor Zhenchao Qian. Professor Jacobs is also a faculty affiliate of the Criminal Justice Research Center and of the John Glenn Institute, and he holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Political Science.

• Mei-Po Kwan joined the Geography faculty in 1995. Her research addresses questions in geographical information systems (GIS) for transportation. She is particularly concerned with individual accessibility, telecommunications and information technologies, human activity patterns, and gender and racial issues in urban transportation. Her research emphasizes the need to bridge different subfields of the discipline, and she has made important contributions to the development of innovative geographical methods. Her work appears in major journals, including a recent paper in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Her influence on contemporary geographical research was recognized through her invited presentation in the Presidential Plenary Session at the 2004 AAG Centennial Meeting. This year, Kwan will be recognized with the Ullman Award at the Association of American Geographers meeting in Denver. Professor Kwan is a faculty associate of the Department of Women’s Studies, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, the Center for Human Resource Research, the Initiative in Population Research, and the John Glenn Institute.