Trustees: Au, Petty Named Distinguished University Professor

AU, PETTY NAMED DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

COLUMBUS -- The Ohio State University has honored two of its
most outstanding faculty members with the Distinguished 
University Professorship.  The 1998 honorees are Jessie L.-S. Au 
of DUBLIN and Richard Petty of HILLIARD.

     At the university's Board of Trustees meeting Friday (6/5),
Acting Senior Vice President and Provost Edward J. Ray granted 
each recipient the title and $30,000 over three years to support 
academic work.

"Professor Au and Professor Petty are among our most 
accomplished scholars and teachers.  Both have contributed 
enormously to our university, to their respective academic 
programs and to the international scientific community," Ray 
said.  "Our students benefit greatly, both in the classroom and 
the laboratory, from studying with such eminent scientist."

     Distinguished University Professors continue their regular
program of teaching; research, scholarly or creative work; and
service.  They are nominated by their colleagues both at Ohio 
State and internationally.  Evaluators from outside the 
university are invited to assess the quality and significance of 
each nominee's academic accomplishments.  The selections this 
year were made by a committee that included Deborah J. Merritt, 
professor of law; Brian Joseph, professor of linguistics and 
Slavic and East European languages and literatures; and three 
Distinguished University Professors: Larry Brown, geography; 
Bruce Bursten, chemistry; and L.S. Fan, chemical engineering.

     The 1998 honorees' careers reflect their seniority and
status as faculty leaders:

JESSIE L.-S. AU

Au, a professor of pharmacy and medicine, holds the Dorothy 
M. Davis Chair in Cancer Research.  Her research interests 
include preclinical and clinical pharmacology, particularly in 
the development of new cancer therapies.  She is leading a four-
year international study to improve treatment of superficial 
bladder cancer.  The project is the first to be funded by the 
National Cancer Institute's new Interactive Research Project 
Grants for Cancer, and it is the first Ohio State-led prospective 
multi-center clinical trial of an anti-cancer drug.

"All of her activities in scholarship, teaching and service 
are characterized by the quest for excellence that one expects in 
a Distinguished University Professor," her nominator wrote.  
"Jessie Au is, quite simply, a spectacular researcher.  Her 
research is very fundamental and basic in nature, but has an 
extremely important applied goal: the cure of cancer in humans."

A member of the Ohio State faculty since 1983, Au also is 
past deputy director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, a former 
co-director of its Head and Neck Oncology and Urologic Oncology 
programs, and former director of Translational Research at the 
center.  Au is a scientific adviser to the University of 
Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and the Roswell Park Memorial 
Institute in Buffalo, N.Y.  She also was a member of the Cancer 
Pharmacology Program at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences 
Academic Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, from 1988 to 1993.

Au has received many awards, including the National 
Institutes of Health (NIH) MERIT Award in 1992, the NIH Research 
Career Development Award in 1990 and Ohio State's Distinguished 
Scholar Award in 1992.  She is a Fellow of the American 
Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, served as a Frank 
Duckworth Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida in 1993 
and was a distinguished lecturer at the University of Kentucky in 
1997. 

Au's teaching is marked by her commitment to exposing young 
scientists to the "excitement and challenges of the research 
experience," her nominator wrote.  "Jessie is truly a shining 
light at OSU."

Au earned her Pharm.D. and her Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from 
the University of California, San Francisco, and was a 
postdoctoral fellow in biochemical pharmacology at the Roswell 
Park Memorial Institute Department of Experimental Therapeutics.


RICHARD PETTY

Petty is chair of Ohio State's Department of Psychology and 
also is a 1995 recipient of the university's Distinguished 
Scholar Award.

His research focuses broadly on the situational and 
individual difference factors responsible for changes in beliefs, 
attitudes and behaviors.  Much of his current work is aimed at 
examining the implications of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of 
persuasion for understanding prejudice, consumer choices, 
political and legal decisions, and health behaviors.  This work 
has resulted in seven books and more than 150 journal articles 
and chapters.

Petty's nominators for the professorship noted his scholarly 
peers consider him a major contributor to the study of attitude 
and behavior change, and added that he is one of the most highly 
cited social psychologists in the world.  

"Professor Petty has been a methodological and conceptual 
pioneer in one of the oldest and most important areas of social 
psychology -- understanding attitude formation and change," his 
nominators wrote.

In addition to his empirical work on basic processes in 
persuasion, Petty has served as a consultant and panelist for 
federal agencies such as the National Academy of Sciences 
committee on Dietary Guidelines Implementation to Improve the 
Health of Americans, the National Institute on Drug Abuse panel 
on Using Persuasive Communication to Prevent Drug Abuse, and the 
National Science Foundation panel on the Human Dimensions of 
Global Change.  He recently served as chair of the National 
Institute of Mental Health grant review panel on Social and Group 
Processes.

His nominators described Petty as a "model teacher both at 
the undergraduate and graduate levels.  His graduate mentoring 
skills in particular are truly outstanding and his students have 
achieved impressive success."

Petty graduated from the University of Virginia in 1973 and 
received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Ohio State 
University in 1977.  He began his academic career at the  
University of Missouri and in 1985 was named the Frederick A. 
Middlebush Professor of Psychology.  After a sabbatical at Yale 
University, he returned to Ohio State in 1987 as professor of 
psychology and director of the Social Psychology Doctoral 
Program; his nominators note that under his leadership, the 
program is widely considered the top graduate program in social 
psychology in the world.  In 1995, he was a visiting professor of 
psychology at Princeton University. 

#

Contact:  Edward Ray, Academic Affairs, (614) 292-5881
Jessie Au, Pharmacy, (614) 292-4244
Richard Petty, Psychology, (614) 292-1640