2023 STAR, IMPACT Awards Honor 3 Cottrell Scholars
Research Corporation for Science Advancement has named three exemplary Cottrell Scholars as recipients of its 2023 STAR and IMPACT Awards. CS 2010 Linda Columbus, University of Virginia, and CS 2003 T. Daniel Crawford, Virginia Tech, have won STAR Awards, and CS 1994 Mark Bussell, Western Washington University, has won the IMPACT Award.
“Cottrell Scholars are a remarkable community of academic leaders whose contributions to science and society go far beyond their own campuses,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “As they have advanced in their careers, these awardees have leveraged their skills and influence toward the greater good.”
The STAR (Science Teaching And Research) Award recognizes outstanding research and educational accomplishments, while the IMPACT Award recognizes the work of a Cottrell Scholar who has had a national impact in science through leadership and service. Both STAR and IMPACT awards include a $5,000 cash prize.
The awards will be presented at the 2023 Cottrell Scholar Conference, to be held July 19-21, 2023, in Tucson, Arizona. Recipients will give brief acceptance talks and will be available throughout the coming year to provide mentoring to their early career Cottrell Scholar colleagues, according to RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco.
STAR and IMPACT Award nominees must be at least 12 years beyond the year of their Cottrell Scholar Award and hold an academic position at a research university or primarily undergraduate institution in the United States or Canada.
STAR Award recipient Columbus is a tireless advocate of equity in the classroom and an internationally recognized researcher whose creative and pioneering work on membrane proteins and membranes has inspired others in the field to adapt her approaches. In addition to leading a top research program in biophysical chemistry of function, structure, and dynamics of difficult-to-characterize but important systems, Columbus has driven the effort to redesign the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Virginia to reduce inequities within STEM disciplines. Her redesign of two introductory chemistry courses -- which decreased the performance gaps between first-generation and continuing generations, underrepresented minority and majority, and transfer and four-year students from 15-20% to less than 2% -- led her to inspire, encourage and support others to take on the quest for parity in curriculum. Columbus has been appointed director of a new UVA program to empower STEM faculty to make their courses and programs more equitable.
STAR Award recipient Crawford is recognized as an intellectual leader in advancing electronic structure theory whose educational efforts extend well beyond the Virginia Tech campus. His research has focused on the development and application of robust, reliable, and efficient quantum mechanical models of chemical compounds and reactions, particularly those of chiral molecules. His principal educational focus has been the training of the next generation of computational molecular scientists, developing and teaching curricula spanning high-school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels of instruction and reaching tens of thousands of students worldwide. Crawford is a lead developer of the open-source quantum chemical program package PSI, which is freely available to the global community of computational scientists, and in 2016 founded the MolSSI, which serves and enhances the software development efforts of the global computational molecular sciences community by providing software infrastructure, and by enabling the adoption of standards and best practices.
IMPACT Award winner Bussell is a champion of undergraduate research who has helped build research-rich science programs at a range of institutions and organizations at the regional, national, and international levels. Since joining the faculty of Western Washington University in 1990, Bussell has played a foundational and sustained role in transforming the WWU Chemistry Department into a national model with student participation in faculty-mentored research at its core. His commitment to enabling students to be productive scientists is demonstrated by the well-funded and internationally recognized research program he has led for over 32 years in the fundamental surface chemistry and reactivity of heterogeneous catalysts. Bussell’s advocacy for high-impact research opportunities for undergraduates has included serving as an external consultant to the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Transformations Project in its efforts to infuse course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) and other research skill building activities into the chemistry curriculum. Bussell has provided his expertise to various research universities and primarily undergraduate institutions seeking to grow undergraduate research on their campuses, including the experimental liberal arts institution Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Bussell also served two terms on the Advisory Board of the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund.
