More than two dozen people were honored for their many years of service to UW-Milwaukee at the annual Fall Awards ceremony on Oct. 25 at the Zelazo Center, including faculty and staff from the College of Letters & Science.
Ernest Spaights Plaza Award
Harold Petering
Distinguished professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry
Dates of service: 1971-2021 Colleagues describe David Petering as a critical leader in helping the university reach the highest national ranking of Research 1 in 2015. His own research made a major contribution to this status. Petering’s studies focused on the biochemical effects of toxic heavy metals in the environment, metalcontaining drugs and essential trace metals on biological systems. With his students and collaborators, Petering published 196 papers in journals and 48 papers in books and monographs, including 38 invited reviews. A 2020 Stanford University study ranked him among the top 2% of researchers in his field. His own research made a major contribution to this status. Petering’s studies focused on the biochemical effects of toxic heavy metals in the environment, metalcontaining drugs and essential trace metals on biological systems. With his students and collaborators, Petering published 196 papers in journals and 48 papers in books and monographs, including 38 invited reviews. A 2020 Stanford University study ranked him among the top 2% of researchers in his field. A tireless supporter of broader UWM research efforts, Petering served for 29 years as director and principal investigator of two major interinstitutional centers of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Working with Jeanne Hewitt (UWM School of Nursing), Jerry Resler of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Mayor Tom Barrett, Dr. Petering led the successful effort to establish the school of public health at UWM. He collaborated with Professors James Cook and Guilherme Indig in the formation of the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery, an interdepartmental center focused on discovering new chemical therapies for major diseases. In 1996, Petering established an environmental health science program for middle and high school students, funded by a series of National Institutes of Health grants. This program, involving a number of UWM faculty and staff, has provided tens of thousands of students in the Milwaukee area, many of them low income and underrepresented, with the opportunity to do scientific inquiry in the classroom.
Joanne Lazirko Award for the Innovative Use of Learning Technology
Ann Raddant
Senior teaching faculty, Biological Sciences Raddant leverages technology to improve her students’ learning experiences. She boldly uses a flipped format in a large enrollment course, which involves providing video lectures for students to view before class. This allows classroom and lab time to be spent doing active learning activities that facilitate deeper understanding of course content and help her students develop critical thinking skills in the discipline. She’s also built more effective quizzes in Canvas that generate analytics to get a better sense of how well her students are understanding materials. “Ann demonstrates a willingness to try new approaches, fail, and revise until her goals are achieved,” wrote Connie Schroeder of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
Academic Staff Outstanding Performance & Service Awards
Paul Engevold
Supervisor, Biological Sciences Greenhouse For more than a decade, Paul Engevold has dedicated himself to making UWM’s Biological Sciences Greenhouse facility an invaluable resource for instruction, research and community engagement. Engevold serves on several UWM committees and has hosted workshops for UWM’s College for Kids, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and other organizations, and he recently became the acting director of UWM’s Saukville Field Station.
Frank Holger Foersterling
Supervisor, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory UWM’s nuclear magnetic resonance facility is a state-of-the-art laboratory that’s home to spectroscopic instrumentation, which is crucial to chemistry and biochemistry instruction and research. Frank Holger Foersterling has managed and operated the lab as skilled and trusted mentor for over 25 years. His duties include adjusting and maintaining instruments worth several hundred thousand dollars. Industry partners rely on his expertise to support analytical programs and contracted work. He also teaches, does committee service and regularly publishes work with colleagues. “Researchers highly respect his expertise, and his affable, patient and professional manner is greatly appreciated,” wrote Nicholas Silvaggi, professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
Faculty Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Awards
Peter W. Lenz
Teaching associate professor, psychology Peter Lenz touches the lives of hundreds of students taking psychology classes every semester. As a research methods instructor, Lenz helps students develop the scientific writing and critical thinking skills vital for more advanced coursework and in professional settings. One student credited Lenz for helping him get involved in on-campus research and other opportunities. “He has taken my snowball of interest in psychology, and with a gentle shove in the right direction turned it into a boulder of fascination and determination.”
Rebecca Neumann
Professor of economics
In addition to other courses, Rebecca Neumann teaches two of the Economics Department’s largest sections of introductory economics. She strives in these gateway classes to encourage those who may be “afraid” of economics to succeed, said Kundan Kishor, department chair, in his nomination letter. Neumann approaches economics by encouraging students to connect the subject with their everyday lives and current events. For example, a cookie auction helps students understand the demand curve. Music is sometimes part of the mix – Playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones at the start of class kicks off a discussion on opportunity cost, scarcity and needs versus wants.
Faculty Distinguished University Service Award
Kristene Surerus
Associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry
After distinguishing herself as a researcher, teacher and department chair in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kristene Surerus added another level of service to the university helping campus planners make the best use of the university’s classrooms and buildings. In 2015, she became special assistant to the provost for space planning. In this role, she works with campus planners to update classrooms and develop new active learning spaces. She helped with the new nursing simulation center and the redesign of spaces in the Northwest Quadrant. Her work informs long-range planning for space usage on campus.
UWM Research in the Humanities Awards
Blain Neufeld
Professor of philosophy
Through his powerful and innovative work, Blain Neufeld has achieved an international reputation in political philosophy. Neufeld modifies, extends and defends John Rawls’ theory of political justice, the most important such theory for modern liberal democracies to have appeared in at least a century. In his 2022 book, “Public Reason and Political Autonomy,” Neufeld offers an innovative interpretation and defense of public reason, an important and controversial notion in the context of Rawls’ political liberalism. The idea of public reason is that the rules by which we govern our collective lives in a modern democratic liberal society be justifiable to all who are bound by those rules.
Nigel Rothfels
Professor of history
Nigel Rothfels is a historian and leading authority on animal studies and zoo history. His research has been broadly acclaimed, garnering him international attention and grant funding. Rothfels wrote about animals in captivity in his first book, “Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo.” His most recent monograph, “Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures,” traces the history of elephant-human interactions. Rothfels has written 25 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, coauthored a book about elephants and zoos, and edited a book series in animal studies. He has been the recipient of major national humanities awards in the United States and Australia.
Office of Research Senior Research Awards
John Berges
Professor of biological sciences
John Berges’ research tackles questions in aquatic ecology and cell biology of aquatic organisms, using a broad range of biophysical, biochemical and molecular tools. Focusing primarily on phytoplankton, Berges’ work characterizes responses of algae to environmental stresses. This work has implications for understanding climate change and harmful algal blooms. Berges’ lab was involved in the first genome sequencing of two marine phytoplankton. He has studied topics ranging from algal nitrate metabolism to the “programmed cell death” in phytoplankton, a complex process that scientists are only beginning to understand. He has investigated other challenges facing the Great Lakes, including invasive zooplankton. Berges has been funded throughout his career from U.S. state and federal agencies and the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council. In 2018, he was elected a fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, the major professional organization in his field. He is a fellow of the U.K. Higher Education Academy and in 2015 received a UWM Faculty Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.
W. Hobart Davies
Professor of psychology
For more than three decades, W. Hobart Davies has conducted research designed to help children experiencing both acute and chronic health conditions, and the providers who care for these youth and their families. Davies has made impactful research contributions to many areas of pediatric psychology, including pain and pain dismissal by providers, feeding concerns, gastroenterology, pediatric intensive care, emergency medicine and traumas such as experiencing child abuse or community violence. Within each of these domains, Davies’ work has informed providers and families about best practices. He has been the recipient of numerous grants, has served on the editorial board of five different journals in pediatric psychology, and is a past recipient of the National Award for Professional Innovation in Victim Services from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Foundation Research Recognition Awards
Filipe Alberto
Associate professor of biological sciences
Filipe Alberto is widely recognized as a leading scholar in the field of seascape genetics. His innovative research addresses fundamental questions about evolutionary processes in marine ecosystems and critical applications necesssary to tackle the global need for increased renewable energy and food production. As the principal investigator for multiple federal grants totaling more than $4 million, Alberto has engaged in an ambitious program to characterize the genomes of giant kelp and bull kelp. He is using his findings to breed fastgrowing kelp lineages for biofuel production. Through his remarkable efforts he is continually propagating the largest collection of kelp biodiversity in North America, which he grows in his research laboratory at UWM. Alberto’s work has fundamentally changed our understanding of the ecology and genetics of these ecosystem-building species, and how they adapt to environmental change.
By Kathy Quirk, Laura Otto, and Howie Magner