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Arts and Sciences Faculty Chosen Huber Faculty Fellows

March 2, 2015

Arts and Sciences Faculty Chosen Huber Faculty Fellows

Claudia Buchmann, professor of sociology; Mike Vasey, professor of psychology and Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics, have been selected as Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellows for 2015 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.


Claudia Buchmann is a leading scholar in the sociology of education field and the nation’s foremost expert on women’s rising status in higher education.Buchmann is coauthor of the book, The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools (2013, Russell Sage Foundation), a compelling and comprehensive examination of gender differences in educational attainment and its implications for American schools.

Heralded as a tour de force by Paula England, current president of the American Sociological Association, The Rise of Women was featured in an Author-Meets-Critic session of the 2014 ASA meetings, a highly coveted honor reserved for the 10 most noteworthy books of the year in sociology.

In addition to this critically received book, Buchmann’s articles have appeared in top outlets. Her 2006 coauthored article in the American Sociological Review, the field’s top ranked journal, was the first study to assess broadly the causes of this growing female advantage in college completion with nationally representative data for the United States.

Buchmann has received grants from the Spencer Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. In ongoing work supported by a recent R01 NIH grant, Buchmann extends her work on the changing status of women into the labor market. The first paper from this project is forthcoming in RSF: Journal of Social Issues.

Beyond her research on gender inequality, Buchman’s cutting edge scholarship on race and social class inequalities in terms of access to college opportunities is some of the most important and widely recognized work in the field. In a recent Social Forces article she examines whether and how SAT preparation works to benefit students from wealthy families in the college admission process. In another study, Buchmann examines how national variations in social-structural forces and the organization of schooling relate to social class, immigrant/native and gender differences in education trajectories and outcomes.

In addition to her high impact scholarship, Buchmann has made outstanding contributions in teaching and service to the university. She mentors and publishes with many graduate students. She has served as director of graduate studies since 2010 and under her leadership, the sociology PhD program has continued to rise in stature nationwide.

Buchmann earned a BA in psychology and German from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; a MA in sociology and a PhD in sociology and African studies from Indiana University.

Michael Vasey has a highly successful research program in clinical psychological science. For the past 25 years, his major research aim has been to improve understanding of the role of cognitive processes in the development and maintenance of emotional disorders, with particular emphasis on anxiety and depression. Such understanding is pivotal to efforts to develop more effective ways to treat and prevent these disorders.

Vasey was the first scholar to consider the implications of cognitive development for understanding the phenomenon of worry in childhood and its role in childhood anxiety disorders. Such work ultimately led him to develop an important edited book on the developmental psychopathy of anxiety, The Developmental Psychopathology of Anxiety (2001). Vasey’s work in this area remains central to the field as evidenced by the fact that he is the lead author on the chapter on the developmental psychopathology of anxiety in a major new handbook in the field.

In his research on cognitive factors in anxiety and depression, Vasey has repeatedly broken new ground. He was the first to adapt cognitive psychology research methods to show that anxious children exhibit an attentional bias in favor of threat-relevant information. Building on his work on this attentional threat bias, Vasey was also the first to develop a comprehensive information-processing perspective on the roles played by cognitive factors in childhood anxiety problems. In collaboration with Chris Lonigan, a childhood temperament researcher at Florida State, Vasey proposed an innovative and influential model of risk for anxiety disorders that integrated three areas of research: temperament, cognitive processing, and anxiety pathology. He has extended this model to consider its relevance for understanding the development of depression as well as anxiety.

Vasey has published 72 journal articles to date. These papers have consistently appeared in top-tier outlets across a wide range of sub-disciplines in psychology. Within his discipline of clinical psychology, Vasey’s noteworthy contributions include articles in Clinical Psychology Review, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Journal of Psychiatric Research and Psychological Assessment. All are among the top journals in the field. Additional articles have appeared in strong specialty outlets including the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, Cognitive Therapy and Research Child Development, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, and Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. These are all among the top journals in their sub-disciplines. Vasey has also made important contributions to sub-disciplines outside his own area.

Vasey serves on the editorial boards of two of the top journals in clinical child psychology, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology and Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. Recently, he was also appointed to serve as a founding editorial board member for the prestigious new journal, Current Opinion in Psychology.

Not only is Vasey one of the Department of Psychology’s premier researchers, he is also one of the department’s most accomplished teachers. He has been nominated for teaching awards at the university and college levels and won the department’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006. He has been exceptionally innovative in his teaching, having created six courses in his time at Ohio State.

Vasey has provided outstanding service to the department and d the university. He has served as director of Graduate Studies, chair of the Graduate Admissions Committee and several terms on the psychology department’s Promotion and Tenure Reading Committee and Peer Review Committee. He is currently area coordinator of the department’s Clinical Psychology Area and the College of Arts and Sciences' Graduate Curriculum Committee.

Vasey earned a BS in psychology from North Dakota State University, a MS and PhD in psychology from Pennsylvania State University.

Bruce Weinberg is a widely known and respected labor economist with research interests in technological change and wage inequality, peer effects in economic and social interactions and the “science of science,” including the life cycle of scientific productivity, the impact of science funding and other policies on scientific output and the organization of scientific research.

The science of science has become Weinberg's signature field, and he is one of a handful of economists who are major players in this rapidly growing field.

Weinberg has published 24 articles in refereed journals, including three in flagship economics journals, American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy. One unusual aspect of Bruce’s publication record is that he has published two articles in Science and one in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. These are very high profile general science journals, and it is rare for economists to publish in them.

Weinberg was lead author of a study published in Science, finding that university research is a key component to the U.S. economy, returning the investment through enormous public value and impact on employment, business and manufacturing nationwide. Weinberg’s results also shed light on a diverse workforce. According to his research, most of the workers supported by federal research funding are not university faculty members; fewer than one in five workers supported by federal funding is a faculty researcher. Using a new data set, Weinberg found that each university that receives funding spends those dollars throughout the United States--about 70 percent spent outside their home states--supporting companies both large and small.

Weinberg has been principal investigator on grants totaling $6.7 million, of which $5.8 million are for currently active projects. Of particular note is a $4.4 million project on “Innovation in an Aging Society” from the National Institute on Aging (September 2013 to June 2018).The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of economists, physicians, computer scientists and others for a series of interrelated projects on scientific innovation in the context of both an aging general population and an aging scientific workforce. This grant is administered by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a highly respected nonprofit nonpartisan economics research organization with a large portfolio of complex multi-institution grants.

Another indicator of Weinberg’s stature in the economics profession is his appointment as a research associate at NBER. In order to maintain this affiliation, an individual must be a productive and well known economist with significant research funding. In addition, Weinberg serves as co-chair of the Biomedical Research Workforce Modeling Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee to the Directorate of the NIH. This committee is intended to study and identify solutions to the problem of a rapidly aging biomedical research workforce.

Weinberg earned his BA and PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

 

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