Alumni and faculty capture awards

Faculty and alumni of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are well represented in the 2007 UConn Alumni Association awards.

The 2007 Distinguished Alumni Award will be presented this fall to Alan R. Bennett, CLAS ’69, managing partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm, Ropes & Gray. His practice focuses on legal issues surrounding the development and marketing of medical products.

Bennett was a political science major and honors scholar at UConn who later received a JD from Columbia Law School. He served in the office of the General Counsel of the Food and Drug Administration and later was a legislative assistant to the late Senator Jacob Javits and Counsel to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, where he concentrated on a variety of health regulatory matters, consumer protection, and administrative law issues.

He has been a member of the UConn Foundation Board of Directors since 2004 and is a life member of the UConn Alumni Association.

Joshua E. Dunn, CLAS ’92, will receive the Connecticut Alumni Service Award. Dunn, a sociology and political science major in CLAS, earned a law degree at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. He was Counsel for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in Chicago until 1997. Currently he is vice president of wealth management at Smith Barney in Hartford.

He served on the national Board of Directors of the Alumni Association for six years and founded the Young Alumni Committee and oversaw the financing of the Alumni House. He was appointed a life member of the Alumni Council in 2005.

Four CLAS faculty will receive the association’s teaching and research awards.

The Faculty Excellence in Research (Humanities and Social Sciences) will go to Richard Langlois, professor of economics. Langlois’s research interests are the economics of organizations, technological change, and social institutions. He has written about the computer, semiconductor, and software industries, and won the Newcomen Award for his history of the microcomputer industry. In 2006 he won the Provost’s Research Excellence Award.

Kent Holsinger, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, will be awarded for Faculty Excellence in Research (Sciences). His research centers on the evolution of plant reproductive systems, the genetics of geographically structured populations, and the application of basic biological principles to conservation problems. He is the immediate past president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences and is an officer of the Botanical Society of America.

The award for Faculty Excellence in Teaching at the undergraduate level will go to Richard Hiskes, professor of political science. Hiskes is the senior political theorist in the political science department and editor of the Journal of Human Rights, is director of the new undergraduate minor in human rights. He is the author or co-author of five books, and his current research focuses on environmental human rights and justice across generations.

Michelle Williams, associate professor of psychology and director of clinical training, will be awarded for Faculty Excellence in Teaching at the graduate level. Williams is the faculty adviser for the Minority Advancement Program for students in psychology who plan to attend graduate school. She advises more than 30 undergraduates and eight graduate students each year. In 1999 she won the AAUP Excellence Award for Teaching Promise.