Five awarded Holladay Medals

The NC State Board of Trustees has awarded the Alexander Quarles Holladay Medal for Excellence to five faculty members in recognition of their outstanding careers at NC State. The Holladay Medal is the highest honor bestowed on a faculty member by the trustees and the university.

This year’s honorees are Dr. Kenneth B. Adler, professor of molecular and biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine; Vincent M. Foote, professor of industrial design in the College of Design; Dr. Hassan A. Hassan, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the College of Engineering; Dr. Lucinda H. MacKethan, professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences; and Dr. Bruce J. Zobel, professor emeritus of forestry in the College of Natural Resources.

The medals will be presented during the university’s Honors Baccalaureate and Celebration of Academic Excellence, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 13 in the McKimmon Center.

The Holladay Medal is named for Col. Alexander Quarles Holladay, the university’s first president. It recognizes the contributions of faculty members in teaching, research and service. Winners receive a medal and a framed certificate, and their names are inscribed on a plaque in the NC State Faculty Senate chambers.

• Dr. Kenneth B. Adler has devoted almost 17 years to research, scholarship and teaching at NC State. As one of the world’s top-ranked biomedical research scientists with more than 20 years of continuous research funding from the National Institutes of Health, his achievements have the potential to positively and significantly impact the lives of people with severe respiratory diseases such as asthma and cystic fibrosis. A keystone of his career was the development of a novel cell-culture system for growing lung cells from humans or other animals. Adler has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and is sought out as a speaker for both national and international conferences.
  In addition, his focus on training both Ph.D. students and post-doctoral fellows has added dozens of well-trained scientists to the community. He has garnered support from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences for such training programs.

• Vincent M. Foote has served for over 36 years in the Department of Industrial Design. For his excellence in educating generations of award winning design professionals and educators, he has received the Outstanding Teacher Award, the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award, and the Board of Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Foote has received many professional honors and citations including membership in the Industrial Designers Society of America (ISDA) Academy of Distinguished Industrial Design Educators, Phi Kappa Phi, and Carnegie Mellon University Presidents Professional Design Advisory Board. He is a Fellow in the IDSA, for which he served as National Vice President, as a member of the Board of Directors, a member of the Executive Committee, and three times as National Education Committee Chair. As member of the National Education Committee School Review, he conducted on-site accreditation reviews of Industrial Design programs across the country, thus shaping the standards for excellence in design education in the U.S.A. He has chaired 175 graduate committees and has served on graduate student committees for 85 Industrial Design/Product Design/Visual Design Masters students.

• Dr. Hassan A. Hassan has been an outstanding teacher and researcher at NC State for over 42 years. His national teaching awards include the ASEE Western Electric Award, Pi Tau Sigma-ASME Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award, and the RJ Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Extension. He was a member of the team that founded NC State’s aerospace engineering program, which has become one of the most highly recognized in the country. He has supervised 67 Masters and 33 Doctoral graduate students. Hassan has made seminal contributions to the fields of plasma dynamics, electrical propulsion, electric discharge and nuclear pumped lasers for space application, re-entry physics, transition and turbulence, and hybrid large-eddy/Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes methods. He has 175 publications, 120 of those in AIAA journals. He received the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumnus Award, Alcoa Foundation Distinguished Engineering Research Award, NASA Public Service Medal, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Thermophysics award. He has been named an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor. Hassan’s research group’s work was a cornerstone of the Mars Mission Research Center, a NASA Center of Excellence established at NC State in 1989.

• Dr. Lucinda H. MacKethan’s distinguished achievements during 32 years in the NC State English Department encompass teaching, research, outreach, and service. As a Hewlett Professor, she worked to implement undergraduate curricular innovation. She has directed 48 Masters students and has served on Ph.D. committees at UNC-CH and the NC State College of Education. She was named Alumni Distinguished Professor, was twice CHASS nominee for the NC State Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, and is a member of the NC State Academy of Outstanding Teachers. MacKethan is one of the nation’s foremost scholars in literature of the American South, having published three monographs, four edited books, essays, book reviews, and articles in reference works. The Companion to Southern Literature, which she co-edited, received the 2002 Best Reference Book designation from the American Library Association. She co-designed the Teacher Education concentration in English. While Director of Creative Writing, she built a program that enabled the department to plan its new MFA degree. A former fellow of the National Humanities Center, she directed three NEH Summer Teacher Institutes held there. Grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have funded her national workshops on American women’s writing, including one for NC State alumni teaching English in public schools. Her online curriculum at the National Humanities Center is used statewide for professional development of secondary teachers. She is chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council, and as member of the scholarly design team of Americansouth.org she oversees a new Mellon Foundation-funded website that provides a scholarly portal for the Culture of the American South.

• Dr. Bruce J. Zobel has been an NC State pioneer for over 45 years, transforming forest genetics from a field of largely academic inquiry into a holistic system of scientific thought and research management. The forest genetics work he implemented through the N.C. State University Industry Cooperative Tree Improvement Program in 1957 is his great legacy: 20 industry partners in six states select and plant more than 800 million trees on 1.3 million acres in the southeastern U.S. every year, about 50% of the annual tree planting in the entire U.S.A. Zobel’s vision led to the creation of NC State University’s International Cooperative for Gene Conservation and Tree Improvement (CAMCORE), which focuses on the preservation, evaluation, and utilization of the coniferous and hardwood resources of Central America and Mexico, and became a model for other cooperative ventures at universities world-wide and in other fields of forestry research. He has chaired, co-chaired and served on 169 graduate committees. He continues to be a prolific and influential scholar having published 333 papers and authored six books, including the widely adopted Applied Forest Tree Improvements, now in its third printing. He was elected a Fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science, the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (also receiving the TAPPI Gold Medal), and the Society of American Foresters (also receiving its Sir William Schlict Memorial Medal and Barrington Moore Award for Outstanding Research). He received an honorary D.Sc. from Syracuse University and is among the few foreign members of the Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Silviculture and the Argentine Forestry Association. In 1972, Zobel received the UNC Board of Governors’ highest faculty honor, the O. Max Gardner Award, for outstanding contributions to the welfare of humankind.

Posted May 7, 2004

Return to the Bulletin homepage