Two University of Colorado at Boulder professors have been nominated to receive the prestigious designation of distinguished professor, pending approval by the Board of Regents on Dec. 13.
The nominees are Jane Menken, professor of sociology and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science, and Steven Maier, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Neuroscience. They would join only 18 other CU-Boulder faculty members who currently hold the title of distinguished professor.
According to Regents' laws, the designation of distinguished professor is bestowed on members of the university's faculty "who have distinguished themselves as exemplary teachers, scholars and public servants, and who are individuals having extraordinary international importance and recognition."
Menken is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received a number of prestigious awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow.
Menken is recognized worldwide as a scholar in social science and demography. As chair of the NAS Committee on Population, Menken is examining how the world will deal with the increasing longevity and aging of the global population. The committee also is working on ways to more accurately forecast future population size and characteristics.
She has conducted two decades of groundbreaking work on women and fertility in Bangladesh, and both undergraduate and graduate CU-Boulder students are active participants in her work. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a master's degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and a doctoral degree from Princeton University.
Maier has made significant contributions in three disciplines -- psychology, neuroscience and immunology, and helped found a fourth discipline, psychoneuroimmunology, that is now internationally recognized.
Maier is exploring the changes in brain chemistry that determine the effects of stress and the chemical links between the brain and the body that could lead to progress against depression, cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer's disease and AIDS, chronic pain and a host of other poorly understood diseases.
He has been the recipient of many awards. Maier has held the title of National Institutes of Health Senior Research Scientist since 1980 and was named the Grass Foundation Traveling Neuroscience's Scholar and a Phi Beta Kappa Traveling Scholar. External reviewers rate his scholarly contributions at the top of the field.
Maier has been a mentor to 19 doctoral students who now hold faculty or research positions at top universities and research laboratories, and also has supervised a number of undergraduates in his laboratory through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and the Honors Program.
He earned a bachelor's degree from New York University and holds master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.