Twenty retiring faculty members were recognized during Vanderbilt’s Commencement ceremony May 9, when the university honored their years of service and bestowed on them the title of emeritus or emerita faculty.
James E. Auer, senior lecturer, emeritus
Auer was the founding director in 1988 of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies’ Center for U.S.-Japan Studies and Cooperation. Before coming to Nashville, he served as a naval officer for 20 years, commanding a frigate home-ported in Japan, and served as the special assistant for Japan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Over the past 25 years, the Center for U.S.-Japan Studies and Cooperation has promoted cooperation between the two countries in the areas of economics, national security and technology, including hosting more than 100 Japanese research fellows over the years who went on to assume important positions in the Japanese civil service, politics, military and mass media. Auer taught current U.S.-Japan relations in the Asian studies program, as well as the history of sea power, mostly to students in the Naval ROTC program at Vanderbilt. His activities in U.S.-Japan relations garnered him important recognition from the government of Japan. In December 2008, he received the Japanese government’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, presented by the consul general of Japan in Nashville on behalf of the emperor of Japan. In October 2013, he met with the prime minister of Japan at his official residence in Tokyo and was presented a letter of appreciation for promoting close U.S.-Japan relations for 25 years at Vanderbilt.
Lewis V. Baldwin, professor of religious studies, emeritus
Baldwin, a native of Alabama and a college student at the height of the civil rights and black power movements, is an ordained Baptist minister. He joined the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt in 1984 and served until his retirement in December 2013. Baldwin maintained an abiding interest in black Methodism, publishing two books on the African Union Methodist tradition, before turning to Martin Luther King Jr. when he published There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King Jr. (1991). His Oxford monograph titled The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King Jr. (2010) was a classic exposition of American church history. This was followed by Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (2010). Baldwin is the author or co-author of eight monographs, two edited volumes, five bibliographies and study guides and more than 60 articles. His work in retirement continues with several monographs in progress on John Wesley and the oppressed, on black slave thought, on Malcolm X, and on Martin Luther King Jr.
Susan Berk-Seligson, professor of Spanish, emerita
Berk-Seligson came to Vanderbilt in 2004 as an expert in sociolinguistics and forensic linguistics. She introduced several new undergraduate linguistics courses at the university, including Pragmatics, Spanish in Society, Communicating Across Cultures, Language and Law, and a graduate seminar in research and grant proposal writing. She also served as associate director and director of graduate studies of the Center for Latin American Studies. While at Vanderbilt, Berk-Seligson published Coerced Confessions: The Discourse of Bilingual Police Interrogations with Mouton DeGruyter. Her research, including more than 30 journal articles and book chapters, was funded by four National Science Foundation fellowships and grants as well as grants from other sources. She gave more than 70 invited talks in the United States and abroad, including a keynote address at the Peace Palace in The Hague. Berk-Seligson currently serves on the editorial boards of seven journals. Her University of Chicago Press book The Bilingual Courtroom, currently in its second edition, was awarded the British Association for Applied Linguistics’ award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Applied Linguistics and has become a standard reference in the field. As a result, she has served as a linguistic expert in more than 25 legal cases.
Carolyn J. Bess, associate professor of nursing, emerita
A Vanderbilt University School of Nursing alumna, Bess joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 1971. She served the School of Nursing in a variety of leadership positions, including academic-level director of the R.N. pre-specialty program, director of academic enhancement, and assistant director for the Joint Center of Nursing Research, as well as taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. For the last 18 years, a major focus has been her leadership and mentorship on the master’s program curriculum committee. Bess designed and implemented one of the first R.N.-to-M.S.N. curricula in the United States. She redesigned and implemented educational methodology to embrace a variety of computer approaches to facilitate student learning, and shared her expertise of R.N.-to-M.S.N. content and delivery approaches nationally through publications. Bess received the 2002 Innovation in Educational Programming that Has Made a Significant Contribution to Teaching and Learning Award, given by the faculty to the faculty, as well as the VUSN Ingeborg Grosser Mauksch Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentoring in 2008. She also was recognized during VUSN’s centennial celebration as one of the top 100 leaders who have made a significant contribution to the nursing profession.
Raymond F. Burk, professor of medicine, emeritus
Burk, who earned his M.D. at Vanderbilt, was recruited as director of gastroenterology in the Department of Medicine in 1987. The gastroenterology division and its training program grew significantly under his direction, and he played a major role in establishing the Vanderbilt liver transplant program. More recently, he served on and chaired the scientific advisory committees of the Clinical Research Center and the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Burk began working on selenium nutrition and biochemistry in 1964 as a first-year medical student and has maintained selenium as his research focus for 50 years. He published numerous papers and received multiple awards for his research from the American Institute of Nutrition and the organization Trace Elements in Man and Animals. Burk published more than 170 research articles and 64 reviews or chapters in high-caliber journals; chaired several NIH review panels; and served on the editorial boards of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Nutrition and Journal of Trace Elements in Experimental Medicine. He taught throughout his academic career and received national and international awards based on his research success, as well as served on critical committees for the World Health Organization and the Institute of Medicine.
Colleen Conway-Welch, dean of nursing, emerita, and Nancy and Hilliard Travis Professor of Nursing, Emerita
Conway-Welch served as a professor of nursing and dean of Vanderbilt University School of Nursing for 30 years before stepping down as dean in 2013. Active in nursing practice and education for more than five decades, she served on President Reagan’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic (1988); the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare (1998); the Governor’s Tennessee Commission on the Future of TennCare (2000–01); and the Institute of Medicine Committee on Evaluation of Federal Quality Oversight, Improvement and Research Activities (2001–02). In 2002, she was appointed by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to the Secretary’s Council on Public Health Preparedness, and in 2004, she was named to the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee of DHHS and a member of the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute. She was named by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2006 as a member of the Board of Regents of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the premier graduate education program for military health care providers. In 2007, she was appointed by DHHS Secretary Mike Leavitt to the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. She is a former president, and one of the founders, of the Friends of the National Institute for Nursing Research at the NIH. In 2009, she was named one of Modern Healthcare’s Top 25 Women in Healthcare.
Thomas S. Dina, professor of radiology and radiological sciences, emeritus
After becoming radiology residency program director at Vanderbilt in 1995, Dina assumed responsibility of 26 residents and built the program to its current number of 32 residents. For 15 consecutive years, all of the residents graduating from the program under his tutelage passed the American Board of Radiology oral exam. Dina chaired Vanderbilt’s Graduate Medical Education Committee for the last 15 years. He also chaired the GME Residency Review Committee and the GME House Staff Expansion Committee. Dina received national recognition for his service on several committees, including from the American Society of Neuroradiology, which honored him as a reviewer for the American Journal of Neuroradiology. Since 2003, he has served as a reviewer for the scientific program of the ASNR Annual Meeting. Dina’s primary involvement was with the Southeastern Neuroradiological Society, for which he served as annual meeting program director and as president. In addition, he has been a loyal examiner for the ABR oral exams since 1999.
Lawrence W. Dowdy, professor of computer science and computer engineering, emeritus
Dowdy has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1981. He spent one sabbatical year at the Institut für Informatik at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), and a second sabbatical year at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom) in the School of Computing. He served as chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Computer Science from 1995 to 1998 and as Vanderbilt Dean of Students from 1998 to 2001. Dowdy is a member of the IFIP Working Group 7.3, an international group of researchers in the area of performance measurement and modeling of computer systems. He served as chair of ACM SIGMETRICS and as the senior editor of the Performance Supplement Project, a joint project sponsored by ACM SIGMETRICS and the Computer Measurement Group. Between 1991 and 2011, he participated in 19 Alternative Spring Break experiences with Vanderbilt students. The co-author of three books, Dowdy was awarded the Tau Beta Pi Award for Teaching Excellence (1985), the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1985), the Chancellor’s Cup (1997), the Lotus Eaters and Athenians “Favorite Administrator” Award (1999) and the Edward J. White Award for Service within the School of Engineering (2006).
Carol Etherington, associate professor of nursing, emerita
Etherington came to Vanderbilt as an adjunct faculty member, supervising graduate students in law, medicine, divinity and nursing. She taught an annual class on domestic violence to every second-year Vanderbilt medical school class since 1991. In 1995, she became a full-time faculty member at VUSN, introducing students to the life realities of populations including formerly homeless adults, refugees and immigrants, and families living in poverty in urban and rural settings. In 1998, she initiated VUIII, a series of conversations among faculty from the schools of medicine, law, nursing, divinity and business to promote an interdisciplinary approach to addressing complex global health and social problems. In 2006, Etherington began working with Vanderbilt’s Institute for Global Health, assisting the emerging Global Health Certificate Program in the School of Medicine and the eventual development of the M.P.H. global health track. She mentored undergraduate and graduate students, serving as a faculty adviser for Vanderbilt honors students, Ingram Scholars, Frist Scholars and graduate nurses selected for the Nurse in Residence Program launched in 2013. Beyond Vanderbilt, Etherington served a six-year term, including two years as president, on the Board of Directors of Doctors Without Borders and received the Florence Nightingale Medal from the International Committee of the Red Cross. She was named Distinguished Alumna of the Year by the Vanderbilt Alumni Association in 2007 and recipient of the VUMC Martin Luther King Jr. Award in 2013.
Richard M. Heller, professor of radiology and radiological sciences, emeritus
Heller joined the Vanderbilt University Medical Center faculty in 1975 and served as director of the radiology residency program until 1995. His educational efforts in pediatric radiology at Vanderbilt deeply broadened the learning experiences of countless medical students, residents and fellows in the Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and other departments at VUMC. He founded the Section of Pediatric Radiology, the Pediatric Radiology Clerkship for medical students, and the first fellowship in pediatric radiology at Vanderbilt. The Department of Pediatrics awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award for Teaching in Pediatrics in 1999. He was honored with a named lectureship in the Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and was instrumental in designing the layout of pediatric radiology at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, where subsequently a classroom was dedicated in his name. Heller served for many years as an examiner in pediatric radiology on the American Board of Radiology exams and received the Distinguished Service Award. In addition, Heller has served since 1981 as Honorary Danish Consul for Tennessee and has been awarded Knight, First Class by the Queen of Denmark.
Kazuhiko Kawamura, professor of electrical engineering, computer engineering and engineering management, emeritus
Kawamura joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1981. He spent a year on sabbatical at the University of Reading (United Kingdom), where he co-developed the U.S.–U.K. Workshop on Cognitive Robotics, Intelligence and Control. He served as director of the Management of Technology Program (1998–2000), the U.S.–Japan Center for Technology Management (1991–99), and the Center for Intelligent Systems (1991–2012). Kawamura was a member of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Technology Capabilities of Non-Department of Defense Providers in 1999. He served as an outside University Professor at Waseda University (Japan) for two years, advising faculty in developing international programs in science and technology. He served as founding chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Technical Committee on Service Robots and as general chair of several related conferences. In 2002, he was elected a fellow of IEEE for pioneering work on understanding, modeling and implementing human-robot synergistic systems. Kawamura holds three U.S. patents and received a NASA Space Act Award in 2004 for “Robot Control Architecture for Creative Problem Solving.”
Mark J. Koury, professor of medicine, emeritus
After his appointment to the Vanderbilt School of Medicine faculty in 1980, Koury established a research program based on animal models of erythropoiesis, the process of red blood cell production. Collaborating with his longtime Vanderbilt colleague Maurice Bondurant, Koury described how the kidneys produced the hormone erythropoietin, the principal regulator of erythropoiesis, and how developing erythroid cells in the bone marrow required erythropoietin to survive and form new red blood cells. He was the mentor or co-mentor for 11 post-doctoral fellows who have worked in his lab and are now in academic, industrial or private practice positions. He was a member of the post-graduate education committees of Vanderbilt and Meharry Medical College and taught formal courses in the Vanderbilt School of Medicine and the College of Arts and Science. Koury served eight years as the associate chief of staff for education at the VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, where he was responsible for administration of house staff training programs for both Vanderbilt and Meharry at TVHS. He was a regular and ad hoc member of NIH study sections as well as a grant reviewer for the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.K. National Health Service, and the National Cancer Institute of Canada.
John M. Leonard, professor of medicine, emeritus
Leonard earned his M.D. from Vanderbilt, where he was the Founder’s Medalist of his class. He returned to Vanderbilt in 1971 to complete his residency in internal medicine, then served as the Hugh J. Morgan Chief Resident in Medicine before pursuing subspecialty training in infectious diseases. Beginning in 1974, Leonard was an attending physician in the Department of Medicine and a consulting physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases. From 1983 to 2003, he was director of residency training for the Department of Medicine. In this capacity, he for many years directed the Junior Medicine Clerkship and later was instrumental in establishing the combined Medicine/Pediatric Training Program at Vanderbilt. In recent years, he served as director of the Physical Diagnosis course and was active in counseling residents and students. Leonard received numerous teaching awards at Vanderbilt: the Thomas E. Brittingham Award for Teaching Excellence in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994 and 2011; the Distinguished Housestaff Teacher in 1992; the Hugh Jackson Morgan Teaching Award in 2001, 2005 and 2012; and the William Schaffner Teaching Award (Division of Infectious Diseases) in 2013. In 2012, Leonard received the Vanderbilt School of Medicine Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Charles M. Lukehart, professor of chemistry, emeritus
Lukehart came to Vanderbilt in 1973. His research interests focused initially on transition metal organometallic chemistry and more recently on nanomaterials and materials chemistry. His research resulted in more than 190 peer-reviewed scientific publications, three edited/co-edited books, and six U.S. patents. He served the Department of Chemistry as director of graduate studies for 21 years and as director of the GAANN Fellowship Program in Chemistry for 15 years, twice as acting chair and as associate chair for 16 years. He served the university as a founding member and associate director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Materials Science and as chair of the VEHS Chemical Safety Committee. He was elected to terms on the Aarts and Science Faculty Council and the Faculty Senate and to two terms as chairman of the Nashville Section of the American Chemical Society. Lukehart takes great pride in the academic and professional development of his students and research group members. More than 40 M.S. and Ph.D. students, nine post-doctoral associates or visiting professors, and 17 undergraduate students worked with him. In 1995, his graduate students established the Charles M. Lukehart Endowment Fund for Graduate Study in Chemistry in his honor. He received the 2009 College of Arts and Science Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring, and he is a three-time recipient of the American Chemical Society Student Affiliates Excellence in Teaching Award.
Jane H. Park, professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, emerita
Park’s research career started in the late 1940s, when she was an undergraduate at Washington University and worked with the famous embryologist Victor Hamburger. In St. Louis, she became familiar with the work of Carl and Gerti Cori and decided on a career in biochemical research. She pursued postdoctoral studies with Nobelist Severo Ochoa at New York University; another famous mentor was Nobelist Fritz Lippman, whom she joined for a postdoctoral fellowship from 1953 to 1954. In 1953, she married the newly appointed chair of physiology at Vanderbilt, Charles (Rollo) Park, whom she met in the Cori lab. Park joined the Department of Physiology at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in 1954, making 2014 her 60th year as an active member of the faculty. For many years, she focused her research on glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase and became nationally recognized for her mechanistic studies of this enzyme. Around 1975, she began studying muscular dystrophy using a hereditary model of the disease in chickens. Ultimately she used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and eventually, magnetic resonance imaging to study muscle function in a variety of muscle diseases. Park has an outstanding record of service and teaching at Vanderbilt, having trained a large number of scientists and physicians who have gone on to eminent careers. She held leadership positions over her long career, including as treasurer of the American Society of Biological Chemists; as chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Aging; and in the National Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood Diseases.
Charlotte Pierce-Baker, professor of women’s and gender studies and professor of English, emerita
Pierce-Baker arrived at Vanderbilt in 2006. She has engaged in a scholarly life devoted to public discussion of difficult issues, including racial prejudice, sexual violence and mental illness. Among her publications are Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape and This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son. She taught courses on contemporary African American women writers, linguistics, trauma, and sexual violence. At Vanderbilt, she served as interim director and then director of the program in women’s and gender studies from 2008 to 2011. In 2009, the Vanderbilt Divinity School Office of Women’s Concerns awarded her the Women’s Month Celebration of Research Award. Pierce-Baker has been a member of The Voices and Faces Project in Chicago since 2003 and an honorary co-founder and member of COUNTERQUO, an interdisciplinary initiative supporting abused women and men. She is currently engaged in a project titled “I’ve Got a Story to Tell: Trauma through Literature and Psychology” and has spoken extensively on trauma and sexual violence.
Daniel J. Reschly, professor of special education, emeritus
Reschly, professor of education and psychology at Peabody College since 1997, served as chair of the Department of Special Education from 1998 to 2006. In 2003, the department achieved its first No. 1 national ranking. He published research on response to intervention, reduction of special education disproportionality, identification of disabilities (high incidence, minority issues), and policy issues in special education. In recent years, he served as an expert witness in trials involving claims of mild intellectual disability in death penalty cases. In 1999, he was listed among the top five in school psychology career service contributions, and in 2004, he was identified as the most widely cited author in school psychology books and journals over the 2002–04 period. Reschly has been active in state and national leadership roles, including serving as president of the National Association of School Psychologists and as editor of the School Psychology Review, among others. He received the NASP Lifetime Achievement Award, three NASP Distinguished Service Awards, the Stroud Award, and the 2007 NASP Legend Award. He was appointed a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society.
Gerald J. Stubbs, professor of biological sciences, emeritus
Stubbs joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 1983 in the Department of Molecular Biology. In his early career, he was best known for determining the structure of tobacco mosaic virus in molecular detail, for many years the only virus for which the structural interactions between the protein coat and the genomic nucleic acid had been observed. He also developed much of the fiber diffraction methodology used to determine this and other structures. In the past decade, he has applied the methods he developed for filamentous viruses to prions and amyloids, the filamentous aggregates of misfolded proteins associated with a number of devastating neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, as well as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, currently a great concern among military and athletic personnel who have suffered head trauma. Beyond Vanderbilt, Stubbs served as director of the North American organization for fiber diffraction, FiberNet, from 2003 to 2008; as a member of the steering panel of the corresponding British organization for several years; and on two occasions as chair of the Fiber Diffraction Special Interest Group of the American Crystallographic Association. In more than 30 years at Vanderbilt, Stubbs taught introductory biology, biochemistry or both almost every year. His undergraduate researchers went on to graduate programs at some of the world’s top universities, including Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge.
George H. Sweeney, professor of economics, emeritus
Sweeney joined the Vanderbilt economics faculty in 1976. He quickly made his mark as a scholar in the field of industrial organization, which studies firm behavior and how it varies under different competitive and regulatory environments. Early in his career, he worked as a visiting scholar in the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division. In 1992, Sweeney became an associate dean for the College of Arts and Science. While he continued to teach microeconomics to undergraduates, his main duties since then were administrative. He served under six deans and contributed in myriad ways to the college’s budgeting and finances, facilities planning, statistical analysis of admissions, grant management, and oversight of conflict-of-interest issues. Many of the new and renovated buildings on campus are partly the fruits of Sweeney’s planning and foresight, including the Chemistry Building, Buttrick Hall, Biological Sciences/MRB III and nearly every Arts and Science lecture hall and classroom.
Joel B. Tellinghuisen, professor of chemistry, emeritus
Tellinghuisen joined the Vanderbilt chemistry faculty in 1975. His early research emphasized ultraviolet and visible spectroscopy relevant to the understanding and development of excimer lasers, like those now widely used in lasik eye surgery. More recently, he focused on statistical data analysis methods of interest to experimental methods more commonly used in the life sciences, like titration calorimetry and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction procedures. With his professional and student collaborators, he published more than 200 refereed papers and book chapters and gave more than 200 invited and contributed presentations on his work. Tellinghuisen’s service to Vanderbilt included a term on the Faculty Council of the College of Arts and Science, two terms on the Graduate Faculty Council, and four terms on the Faculty Senate. He served on the Executive Council and as president of the Vanderbilt chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and on Honor Council Faculty Adviser and Appellate Review boards. He served as a freshman/pre-major adviser for 25 years and was a Commencement marshal since 1989. Tellinghuisen taught 17 different courses in chemistry and supervised undergraduate research projects by 30 students, two-thirds of whom earned co-authorship on published papers describing their work. The appreciative parents of one such student honored Tellinghuisen by endowing an award in his name, given each year since 2003 to a graduating senior in Phi Beta Kappa in recognition of outstanding performance in undergraduate research.
