Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, professor of anthropology; Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, professor of communication; and, Gail McKoon, professor of psychology, have been selected as Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellows for 2013 in recognition of their first-rate scholarship.

The award is in honor of emeritus professor Joan Huber, who served as dean of the social and behavioral sciences from 1984 to 1992 and as Ohio State’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost until her retirement in 1993. Fellows are nominated by department chairs and receive an annual cash award of $6,000 a year for three years to further their research programs.

Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg is a prominent, nationally, and internationally recognized physical anthropologist with a wide range of interests and expertise in dental biology. In particular, her research focuses on developmental biology of the dentition as a window onto primate maturation, life history, and evolution. Her work has been applied in her laboratory and in other research settings around the world to fossil primates and humans in helping us to understand a range of issues relating to growth and development over the last two million years of evolution.

Guatelli-Steinberg has travelled to study collections all over the world—in the U.S., Africa, and Europe—in order to develop the most comprehensive and representative series fossil and modern primates and humans, resulting arguably in the most expansive research program in dental paleoanthropology. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Leakey Foundation and has produced an impressive record of peer-reviewed publications.

Guatelli-Steinberg has published in the leading peer-reviewed journals in her field, including the Journal of Human Evolution, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Evolutionary Anthropology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLoS One, Science, Folia Primatologica, and the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. She has served on the editorial boards of the two leading journals in physical anthropology—the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the Journal of Human Evolution. She served as the president of the Dental Anthropology Association and is a member of the executive committee of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Guatelli-Steinberg is the recipient of the Ohio State University Distinguished Alumni Award for Teaching Excellence and the Barnes Award for Exemplary Teaching from Ohio State-Newark. She received her PhD from the University of Oregon in 1998 and joined the faculty at Ohio State in 2000.

Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick is a nationally recognized expert in the study of media use and effects, particularly in the area of selective media use in the realms of political communication, news, health communication, entertainment, and new communication technologies. Specific examples of her work include selective use of attitude-reinforcing political messages, impacts of exposure to idealized body imagery in the media, effects of statistical/exemplar information in health news, the appeal of tragedy in popular entertainment, and suspense in sports in the media.

She serves as editor of the ISI-ranked journal Media Psychology and has published close to 60 peer-reviewed articles, including 24 in the communication discipline’s flagship journals, in addition to two books and 30 book chapters.

Knobloch-Westerwick earned her PhD from the University of Music, Theatre, & Media, Hanover Germany. She joined the Ohio State faculty in 2005. She has held faculty appointments at Dresden University of Technology (Germany), University of Michigan/Ann Arbor, and University of California-Davis.

Gail McKoon is recognized internationally for her research in human cognition. Her investigations into the processes by which language is understood and the mechanisms by which information is remembered are among the most highly cited in the field. She is especially known for her exceptionally rigorous empirical work and the strongly influential theories she has developed.

McKoon's research has been funded continuously for the past 35 years by the National Research Council of Canada, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute for Child Health and Development, the National Institute for Deafness and Communication Disorders, the Air Force, NSF, and the National Institute for Aging. She is currently PI on a grant from the Institute for Educational Sciences and co-PI on a grant from the National Institute for Aging.

Results of McKoon’s research have been published in the most prestigious journals in psychology, including 11 articles in the premier theoretical journal, Psychological Review. McKoon has an unusually strong commitment to interdisciplinary research as demonstrated by articles in journals outside of basic cognition including Psychology and Aging, Intelligence, Cognition and Emotion, and Neural Computation, as well as leading journals in linguistics.

McKoon was a member of the Department of Education’s National Literacy Panel on Language, Minority Children and Youth and has been a consultant for the Department of Education’s Education Resources Information Center.

McKoon joined the Department of Psychology in 2003 after serving on the faculty at Northwestern University. She is area coordinator for the department’s Cognitive Area Group and she has been a member of the Graduate Studies Committee and the Awards Committee. She serves as a member of the Social Sciences IRB panel.

McKoon received her PhD from the University of Colorado in 1975.