5 UB Faculty Receive Plesur Teaching Excellence Awards

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Five UB faculty members have received 2000 Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Awards from the UB Student Association recognizing their teaching excellence and commitment to students.

The former Student Association Excellence in Teaching Awards were renamed to honor Plesur, a nationally regarded author and scholar of popular culture and the American presidency, who died in 1987. Plesur was so highly regarded that in 1984 a group of his former students established a scholarship fund in his name.

Recipients of the Plesur award are student-nominated and selected. This year's recipients are:

• Michael R. Detty of Irondequoit, associate professor of chemistry and medicinal chemistry. Detty's research interests involve the synthesis and properties of infrared-absorbing dyes, synthetic enzymes and redox catalysts, new routes to 2-azetidinones and taxol sidechain derivatives, and new registration systems for biosensing applications. A faculty member since 1995, Detty came to UB after a career as a research chemist at Eastman Kodak Co.

• Érick Duchesne of Amherst, assistant professor of political science. Duchesne, who joined the UB faculty in 1998, teaches and conducts research in the areas of international political economy, trade negotiations, game theory and Canadian politics. He is working on a comparative political-economy analysis of trade strategies in Canada and the United States.

• Joseph D. Mook of Amherst, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Mook also is director of international education in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Mook's areas of interest include controls, dynamics, system identification, estimation theory, modeling and nonlinear and chaotic dynamic systems. He has authored or co-authored several papers and publications in scholarly journals.

• Phillips Stevens, Jr. of Amherst, associate professor of anthropology. Internationally prominent in his field, Stevens has spent nearly 30 years studying and teaching about cultural anthropology, social organization, religion and cultural change, and has conducted field research in West Africa and the Caribbean. He has been a member of the UB faculty since 1971.

• David P. Willbern of Buffalo, professor of English and associate vice provost for educational technology. Willbern, who has been a UB faculty member since 1973, also is director of the Educational Technology Center at UB. A Shakepearean scholar, Willbern teaches courses in American and English Renaissance literature, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, modern poetry and literary criticism. He has published several articles in literary journals and a book titled "Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). He is working on an essay collection titled "Acts of Hypocriticism" and a book on post-World War II American best-sellers.