September 19, 2001
Professor among seven nationally to receive new National Science Foundation award for expanding scientific research to education
A professor at the University of Washington is one of seven university educators nationwide selected to receive a new National Science Foundation award for integrating research into education, the NSF announced today.
Gretchen Kalonji, Kyocera Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been awarded an NSF Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars. As part of the award, she will receive $300,000 over four years to continue to expand her work beyond the university.
“I’m thrilled, of course,” Kalonji said. “It’s a great honor and, more importantly, the award will give us additional resources to continue to expand our international project-based approaches to integrating research and education. A number of universities around the world have been watching what we are doing at the UW and have expressed interest in working with us. This award will allow us to expand the range of opportunities for international collaboration for our faculty and students.”
Kalonji has pioneered several programs at the UW that encourage engineering students to reach beyond the classroom and engage students from other countries in international research collaborations. In one, freshmen tackle cutting-edge engineering projects in small groups — and part of their teams include students from Tohoku, Japan, with whom they collaborate via the Internet. In another, currently under development, UW students are teamed with counterparts from Sichuan, China, working collaboratively on environmental challenges facing Washington State and Sichuan Province.
Kalonji, a recognized expert in the study of the structure and properties of defects in crystalline solids, has also been involved in integrating science and engineering into the K-12 curriculum and working for broader involvement of minorities in science and engineering since she joined the UW faculty in 1990.
The awards, given for the first time this year, are part of an effort by NSF Director Rita Colwell to encourage the nation’s leading researchers to be involved in education as well as scientific exploration.
“This embodies our priority to recognize the outstanding contributions of scientists and engineers to the leading edge of scientific knowledge at the same time they are advancing the frontier of education,” she said.
Kalonji earned a doctoral degree from MIT in 1982 and served there as an assistant and associate professor before coming to the UW. She has also held visiting professorships at the University of Paris, Orsay, the Max Planck Institute and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984.
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For more information, contact Kalonji at (206) 543-1115 or kalonji@u.washington.edu. The media contact at the NSF is Bill Noxon, (703) 292-8070 or wnoxon@nsf.gov.
The NSF news release about the awards is available on the Web at www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/01/pr0170.htm
