2017-2018 Chancellor's Council Distinguished Teach & Research Awards

The 2017-2018 Distinguished Research Award Recipients Are:

• Michael Findlater  
  Michael Findlater is an associate professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department in the  College of Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University. The Findlater laboratory seeks to encompass a broad range of research areas. These span such disparate topics as C-H bond activation, Lewis acid catalysis, materials applications and the chemistry of the lanthanide elements. These projects are all grounded in the rational design and preparation of catalysts capable of converting low value substrates into important (higher value / functionalized) products via a range of synthetic techniques (organic, inorganic and organometallic alike).

• Fethi A. Inan 
  Dr. Fethi A. Inan is a Professor of Educational Instructional Technology at Texas Tech University where he teaches graduate courses in instructional technology research and online learning. His research interests are adaptive learning systems, individual differences, and technology integration. Dr. Inan has been the Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on several privately and federally funded research projects.

• Venugopal Mendu
  Dr. Mendu, a research scientist who specializes in plant physiology and biochemistry is an assistant professor in Texas Tech University's Department of Plant and Soil Science. Prior to joining the Texas Tech faculty, Mendu served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Biology, École normale supérieure (IBENS) in Paris, and at the University of Kentucky's departments of horticulture and plant pathology. He also worked as a graduate research assistant with the University of Kentucky's Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, as well as a research associate in the Center for Plant Molecular Biology at Osmania University-India.
  
  Mendu received his bachelor's degree in agriculture and master's degree in genetics and plant breeding from ANGR Agricultural University-India. His doctorate in plant physiology/biochemistry/molecular biology is from the University of Kentucky. Awards for Mendu include the Jeffery Fellowship at the University of Kentucky (2006); Kentucky Graduate Scholarship (2003-2008); and Junior Research Fellow, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test-India (1999).

• Heather Warren-Crow  
  Heather Warren-Crow, assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and affiliated faculty in women's studies, is a scholar of media and performance as well as an artist. Her interdisciplinary scholarship centers on the aesthetics of subjectivity in the 19th-21st centuries. She has given sustained attention to the body in analog and digital animation, discourses of adolescence in fine art and popular media, the art of affective labor, and the agency of objects, images, and sounds. Dr. Warren-Crow's first book, Girlhood and the Plastic Image, was recently published by Dartmouth College Press. It argues that fundamental qualities of the digital image—namely, mutability, scalability, and shareability—are associated with girlishness, with the power/vulnerability of girls as they are discursively understood. Through a series of case studies (from the infamous Parked Domain Girl to the landmark work of internet art mouchette.org and the anime film Paprika), Girlhood and the Plastic Image investigates how and why our images promise us the adaptability of youth. Moreover, it registers the girlphobia that has shaped the discipline of media studies. Dr. Warren-Crow is currently writing another book, tentatively titled Nymphology , that deals with the impact of Tiqqun's concept of the Young-Girl on popular political philosophy and the arts.
  
  Committed to theory/practice and multimodal methodologies of academic research, Dr. Warren-Crow creates face-to-face, live-networked, and prerecorded performances that address the function of language, gesture, and emotion in constructing shareable identities. More specifically, she has a number of video and sound pieces confronting the allure of the public confession in the age of social media. Much of her work is a playful mash-up of different modes of discourse: "the do-it-yourself setup and narcissistic self-centeredness of a video blog; the impenetrable yet naggingly profound sentiment of an academic post-Marxistlecture; the tacky, puerile yet sexy tastelessness of a pop music video" (Lori Waxman). Recent exhibitions include Scene: Bluss at the Porsgrunn International Theatre Festival (Norway), 24-Hour Confession at Glasshouse ArtLifeLab in Brooklyn, Electric Nights Festival at Beton 7 in Athens (Greece), and the Resound Festival of Sound Art in Penzance (UK). Dr. Warren-Crow has also worked as a puppet designer and puppeteer.
  
  Dr. Warren-Crow's teaching interests span music, theatre, dance, film, and visual art. She has areas of expertise in intermedia (especially performance art, sound art, and screendance); puppetry, movement-based, and multimedia performance; theatrical design; video and internet art; photography theory; performance studies; cinema and media studies; girlhood studies; gender studies; and vocal aesthetics. Previously, she taught at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the University of California at Berkeley, where she received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. She is also the recipient of three awards from the American College Theater Festival and an Eisner Award for Continuing Creative Achievement (UC Berkeley's most prestigious award for the arts). A former researcher-in-residence at the International Center for the History of Electronic Games and instructor at the Berkeley Repertory School of Theatre, Dr. Warren-Crow has a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley.