Editors: Photographs are available by contacting Greg Swenson at (303) 492-3113 or greg.swenson@colorado.edu.
Three University of Colorado at Boulder faculty members are expected to be named distinguished professors, the highest honor bestowed by CU on its teaching faculty.
The prestigious designation will be awarded to Barbara Engel, professor of history; Fred Glover, professor of business; and Richard Jessor, professor of psychology in CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science, pending approval by the CU Board of Regents at its Dec. 8 meeting.
They will join only 28 other CU-Boulder faculty members ever to be named distinguished professor since the Board of Regents established the designation in 1977.
The distinguished professor title is bestowed on CU faculty members "who have distinguished themselves as exemplary teachers, scholars and public servants, and who are individuals having extraordinary international importance and recognition," according to regents' law.
The longest serving active faculty member at CU-Boulder and one of the founders and directors of CU's Institute of Behavioral Science, Jessor joined the psychology faculty in 1951 as an assistant professor. In 1970, he wrote the first comprehensive plan to increase faculty, student and staff diversity at CU-Boulder called the "Equality of Educational Opportunity and the University of Colorado." The plan was prepared for CU-Boulder's Faculty Council.
Jessor is internationally recognized for developing a theoretical framework about the role of risk behavior in adolescent development called the "problem-behavior theory." In 2003, he was designated a "highly-cited researcher" by the Institute for Scientific Information. In 2005, he received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Society for Adolescent Medicine.
His research group continues to study adolescent development in Denver and Beijing and Zhengzhou, China. Jessor also is continuing to study factors that promote positive youth development, especially among adolescents in developing countries where young people are growing up in severe poverty, with limited access to resources and are vulnerable to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Glover's research interests are in the applications of computer decision support systems. These include industrial planning, financial analysis, systems design, energy and natural resources planning, logistics, transportation and large-scale allocation models. His work is embodied in computer software systems currently serving more than 50,000 users in the United States and many others abroad.
He is best known for his creation of the optimization search methodology known as "Tabu Search," a topic on which more than 250,000 Web pages can be found with a simple Google search. He has authored more than 350 articles and eight books.
A member of the Leeds School of Business faculty since 1970, Glover holds the Comcast Chaired Professor of Systems Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002, and has received numerous prestigious awards, including the highest honor of the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science, the von Neumann Theory Prize. He also is a fellow of numerous professional associations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the INFORMS Society and the Decision Sciences Institute.
Engel is an internationally recognized expert on women in Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of five books and numerous articles on the topic and currently is completing a new book titled "Family Matters: Marriage, its Discontents and the State in Late Imperial Russia." Engel's work has been published in Spanish, French and Russian in addition to English.
She has received numerous honors during her career, including the Heldt Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies. At CU-Boulder she has received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work and the Elizabeth Gee Award. The Gee Award recognizes women faculty for outstanding contributions to research, teaching and service.
Engel joined the history faculty at CU-Boulder in 1976, and was chair of the department from 1995-98. She was director of the Central and Eastern European Studies program from 1993-95. She also is a member of the American Historical Association and the International Federation of Societies for Research in Women's History.