Four Fresno State faculty members and one administrator have been
nominated by President John D. Welty for the California State
University system's newest and most prestigious award, the Wang
Family Excellence Award. Their names and credentials were forwarded
Feb. 5 to the Chancellor's Office, where they and nominees from
21 other campuses will be considered for five systemwide awards
totaling $100,000.
Those nominated from Fresno State are Dr. Maurice Cohen, professor of mathematics; Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, professor of classics; Dr. Robert V. Levine, professor of psychology; Dr. Carlos J. Muller, professor
of enology, food science and nutrition; and Dr. Michael Gorman, dean of library services. All are candidates to receive one of five $20,000 awards to be announced in May by the CSU Trustees.
"Stanley T. Wang [a CSU trustee] has pledged $1 million to the CSU over the next 10 years," Welty said. "Fresno State is proud to nominate five of its own for the 1999 awards."
Wang is founder, president and CEO of Pantronix Corp. (Fremont, Calif.), a firm that provides high-tech components for the medical, aerospace, telecommunications, automotive, instrumentation and computer industries.
Welty said the award is intended "to recog-nize and celebrate individuals for their extraordinary commitment and dedication." He said that faculty nominees must have participated successfully in a campus peer review process in recent years.
Cohen, who has taught at Fresno State since 1969, has been described as "a contemporary example of the Renaissance person." The letter of nomination says, "His discoveries in artificial intelligence, neural networks, and chaos theory, as well as his artistic expression of this work as rendered through his oil paintings, have garnered worldwide acclaim."
Cohen not only inspires gifted students; he has published more than 170 refereed articles and is co-author of two books. In 1994, he developed a "soft solution" to a problem in chaos theory that was considered to be impossible, the results of which are used in the analysis of Holter tapes for the diagnosis of heart disease. His recent awards include a Faculty Research Award from the University of California, San Francisco (1996) and induction as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (1997).
Hanson is described by his peers as one of the "most prominent classicists in the country." Since joining the faculty in 1984, he has become internationally known as a scholar and has attracted the attention of the mainstream media. His record includes nine books published or in press since 1989.
Hanson writes from the perspective of a professor and scholar who also happens to be a farmer, and he blended his knowledge of agriculture and classical Greek civilization to provide unique insights in his 1996 book
The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. His 1996 book, Fields Without Dreams, has been described as "a portrait of the vanishing small farmer." His most recent book, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, examines the decline of emphasis in our universities on the classics and the humanities.
A veteran of 25 years at Fresno State, Levine is described as having "excelled in virtually every domain of his profession - as a lecturer, mentor, adviser, devotee of equity in education, developer of new courses and programs and as a prolific contributor to professional teaching journals."
Levine has written two books and more than 60 articles and chapters in professional journals and other publications in the last five years. His 1997 book, A Geography of Time, which explores various cultures' concepts of time, has been translated and reviewed around the world, receiving praise inside mainstream psychology, in wider academia and in the popular and literary press. The book was awarded the 1998 Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award, the most prestigious award given in psychology for a work about culture.
"Ironically, Dr. Muller has built a program [at Fresno State] that successfully rivals the undergraduate and graduate enology programs that prepared him at the University of California, Davis," according to Welty's letter of recommendation. Since 1979, Muller has been the recipient or co-recipient of research grants in excess of $500,000 and has secured donated laboratory, pilot plant and production equipment worth in excess of $500,000. He planned and helped establish on campus the only commercial winery in the nation operated by a university.
In addition to training students who have shaped and guided the wine industry, Muller has conducted research described as "saving" the wine industry. In 1987 and 1988, The Wine Institute and the California Air
Resources Board chose the Fresno State Enology Program to implement a study of Ethanol Emissions from Fermentation Tanks, research that ultimately saved the industry tens of millions of dollars.
Gorman, who came to campus in 1988, is known nationally and internationally as a scholar in the field of academic librarianship. In the last two years he has lectured in South Wales, Australia, Mexico, Toronto, Copenhagen, and Rome, as well as at library meetings throughout California. His books include Technical Services Today and Tomorrow (2nd ed., 1998) and Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians (1997).
The nominating letter says, "The Madden Library is known for its imaginative and creative uses of information technology" and Gorman "is eager for the Henry Madden Library to become a regional resource for the entire Central Valley." Gorman has played an active role in the development of the university's strategic Plan for Excellence.
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