Eight named CAS fellows

By Shannon Vicic

Eight faculty members on the Urbana-Champaign campus were appointed fellows in the Center for Advanced Study for the 1997-98 academic year by the UI Board of Trustees at its meeting April 10 in Urbana.

The appointments provide untenured faculty members one semester of release time for creative work on self-initiated programs of scholarly research or professional activity. The fellows are chosen in an annual competition by professors in the center.

Two of the appointees have been designated Beckman Fellows. Named for UI alumnus and benefactor Arnold O. Beckman, the appointments recognize outstanding younger candidates who have made distinctive scholarly contributions in the sciences.

Faculty members named Beckman Fellows, and the research they intend to pursue:

• Zhi-Pei Liang, electrical and computer engineering, signal-processing issues confronting functional brain mapping using magnetic resonance imaging.
• Peter A. Petillo, chemistry, polymerization strategies for carbohydrate synthesis.

Faculty members named fellows, and the research they intend to pursue:

• Zong-Qi Cai, East Asian languages and cultures, a study of Liu Xie's "The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons," a premodern Chinese work of literary criticism.
• Rodney W. Johnson, animal sciences, age-related changes in the expression of interleukin-1b in the brain.
• Eva Pomerantz, psychology, the development of sex differences in depressive symptoms.
• Surya Vanka, art and design, graphic symbols and their cross-cultural meanings.
• Arlette Willis, curriculum and instruction, a study of the history of Calhoun Colored School, an independent African-American boarding school.
• Robert A. Wilson, philosophy, concepts of the individual and the roles they play in a range of biological, cognitive and social sciences.

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