UA recently honored four of its most accomplished faculty members by awarding them the rank of “distinguished professor.” The title is awarded to full professors who have excelled at teaching and scholarly activity beyond current expectations and have earned national recognition for their work.
From left are UA President Dr. Luis Proenza; Andrew Borowiec, distinguished professor of art; Dr. Wiley J. Youngs, distinguished professor of chemistry; Dr. Mukerrem Cakmak, distinguished professor of polymer engineering; and Dr. David Baker, interim senior vice president, provost and chief operating officer. Not pictured: Dr. Walter Hixson, distinguished professor of history.
The four honored are:
- Andrew Borowiec, distinguished professor of art;
- Dr. Mukerrem Cakmak, distinguished professor of polymer engineering;
- Dr. Walter Hixson, distinguished professor of history; and
- Dr. Wiley J. Youngs, distinguished professor of chemistry.
Here are profiles of the four:
Andrew Borowiec
Distinguished Professor Andrew Borowiec has been teaching photography at the University of Akron since 1984.
Borowiec received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1982 and for more than 25 years, he has been making photographs of America’s changing industrial and post-industrial landscape. Borowiec has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Arts Council. In 2006, he was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize. Borowiec’s photographs have been exhibited around the world and are in the collections of the Chicago Art Institute, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum and Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
His three monographs, “Along the Ohio (2000),” “Industrial Perspective (2005)” and “Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills (2008),” document America as land and place in the regions many of us call home. The result is a trilogy of works that stand as certain heirs to the New Topographics movement, and which preserve for all time a profoundly poetic and hauntingly tragic vision of America.
Borowiec’s most current work includes a series of photographs titled “The New Heartland (2004-2009),” an investigation in Middle America’s changing landscape. This is his first project using color techniques rather than a black and white approach.
“I make photographs about places,” Borowiec says . ”My work is an extension of a central tradition in fine-art photography that is concerned with interpreting the American land and its culture. I make photographs of landscapes that are neither glamorous nor conventionally beautiful: I photograph everyday places where ordinary people struggle to achieve some semblance of the American Dream under less than ideal circumstances.
“My subjects have included Midwestern factory towns whose industries have closed down, the environmentally ravaged landscape of the Gulf Coast, and, most recently, the new housing developments that are rapidly replacing the rolling farmlands and idyllic small towns that used to define our heartland.
Dr. Walter Hixson
Dr. Walter Hixson
Distinguished Professor Walter Hixson earned a baccalaureate degree from the University of Kentucky, a master’s degree from Western Kentucky University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Colorado. He joined The University of Akron in 1989.
Hixson is a leading historian with expertise in culture and U.S. foreign relations, including the Cold War, Vietnam War, Crime and the American West. He has published six books, three of which were published since his last promotion. He also published seven articles, five book chapters, and 30 book and film reviews. He edited two multi-volume collections on the Vietnam War and World War II and compiled a CD-ROM History of the Cold War.
Hixson’s books have been published by such prestigious presses as Yale University Press, St. Martin’s Press and Columbia University Press. His first book, “George F. Kennan, Cold War Iconoclast,” won the Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His book on Charles Lindbergh is currently in its third edition, while his book, “Murder, Culture and Injustice: Four Sensational Cases in American History,” is now in a second printing with the University of Akron Press.
His primary interest is U.S. foreign policy, the subject of his latest book, “The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy” (Yale University Press, 2008).
“This is the most important work I’ve done,” he said. “The book analyzes how culture and national mythology drive American foreign policy, often in a militant direction. Not everyone likes it.”
Asked about books he would recommend, he started by suggesting Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”
“It is still indispensable,” Hixson says. “His insights on the U.S. national character stand the test of time. To understand the difference between truth and knowledge—that the things we may think are true instead are constructed as truth by the workings of culture—I recommend Foucault and ultimately Nietzsche. The psychologist Jacques Lacan’s work on the human pursuit of jouissance, which can never be attained, is the ultimate insight into understanding human affairs."
Dr. Mukerrem Cakmak
Distinguished Professor Mukerrem Cakmak joined UA in 1983 as a chief engineer in the Department of Polymer Engineering and was appointed assistant professor in 1985. He earned tenure in 1990, and was awarded the title of professor of polymer engineering in 1995. Before coming to Akron, Cakmak received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Technical University of Istanbul, and earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees in polymer engineering from The University of Tennessee.
As an assistant professor, Cakmak received the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation for showing strong promise in academic research. Cakmak received three Best Paper awards from the Society of Plastics Engineers and its 1990 Outstanding Achievement Award.
He has led research efforts with external funding of about $19.5 million. In particular, he was co-leader for the effort to bring to campus a Wright Center of Innovation, the "Center for Multifunctional Polymer Nanomaterials and Devices," led by The Ohio State University. Subsequently he was principal investigator for an $8 million Third Frontier Research Project for Commercialization of Functional Polyimide Films and Nanocomposites. This project integrates efforts at UA, the University of Dayton and Kent State University, and 14 high-tech companies to develop very high value-added optical, high strength and conductive polymer films.
Using the technologies developed in these two efforts, Cakmak has made it possible to develop a strong membrane for a novel "artificial pancreas" using polymers originally synthesized by UA’s Dr. Joseph Kennedy. For their work on the artificial pancreas technology, the pair recently received the 2009 NorTech Innovation Award in the Biosciences category from the Northeast Ohio Technology Association.
"The best part about my job is the freedom to follow my vision and serve the community." says Cakmak, "I passionately believe that universities are an integral part of the society and they must serve the community at all levels to, bettering the lives of people."
Dr. Wiley J. Youngs
Distinguished Professor Dr. Wiley J. Youngs earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980. He joined the Department of Chemistry in 1990 as an associate professor after serving as a postdoctoral research associate at Northwestern University and as an assistant and associate professor at Case Western Reserve University. He was granted tenure at Akron in 1992 and was promoted to professor in 1993. Youngs’ career in inorganic chemistry spans both the synthesis of novel transition metal complexes used for catalysis and in pharmaceutical applications as well as the structural characterization of these materials by X-ray diffraction. He has developed interesting macrocyclic ring systems with application in fuel cell technology. His accomplishments in research include more than 160 publications and 13 patents or patent applications.
Over his distinguished career at Akron, Youngs has been prolific in working with colleagues to secure external research funding. In his recent grant activity, Youngs was a co-primary investigator (with colleagues from Arizona State and NASA) on a $1.5 million Department of Energy award concerning protic salt polymer membranes using high-temperature, water-free proton conductors. He was also a co-primary investigator (with a colleague from Washington University School of Medicine) on a $1.5 million NIH-NIAID grant dealing with silver carbene complexes as treatment of CF lung disease and a co-primary investigator (with another UA faculty member) on a $1.4 million NSF-NIH joint program grant dealing with polymeric drug delivery systems and biofilms in the lung.
Youngs success at grant writing has brought many critical pieces of research equipment to the University, which continues to enhance research efforts and benefit our students and faculty. In addition, he has been awarded federal grants to support undergraduate research at Akron and Research Challenge grants from the Ohio Board of Regents. He currently sits on the editorial board of Metal Based Drugs and has presided over sessions at the American Chemical Society national meetings, served as secretary of the Cleveland Section of the American Chemical Society, and organized the first meeting of the Center for Silver Therapeutics Research at The University of Akron in 2008.
“The best part of my job,” Youngs says, “is the interaction with undergraduate and graduate students on a daily basis in the research laboratory.”
Media contact: Laura M. Massie, 330-972-6476 or massie1@uakron.edu