Kevin Boyle, professor of history, Venkat Gopalan, associate professor of biochemisty, and Richard Shiels, associate professor of history (Newark campus) are being honored for excellence in teaching with the 2010 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

John Mueller, professor of political science, Bradley Peterson, professor and chair of astronomy, and Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology, are being recognized for their exceptional scholarly accomplishments with the 2010 Distinguished Scholar Award.

The Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching honors faculty members for superior teaching. Recipients are nominated by present and former students and colleagues and are chosen by a committee of alumni, students, and faculty. Recipients will be inducted into the university's Academy of Teaching.

To hear his students — and many of his colleagues — talk, Kevin Boyle is more than a history professor; he’s a veritable rock star of a teacher. Consider the following example (one of many similar): “He was the most intellectual and interesting speaker that I have ever had the privilege to hear,” one student wrote. Such high praise is nothing new for Boyle, who earned a National Book Award for his 2004 book Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and served as fall 2009 commencement speaker.

Boyle has taught 17 courses at Ohio State in the last three years and earned rave reviews in all of them, even while serving with distinction on the editorial boards of scholarly journals and mentoring numerous graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to his work with Ohio State students, Boyle teaches a session on law and social justice each summer at the University of Michigan and helps lead a seminar on the history of the civil rights movement at the WEB DuBois Center at Harvard University. Boyle received his BA from the University of Detroit in 1982 and his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1990. He has been at Ohio State since 2002.

Venkat Gopalan is a national expert in the field of ribonuclease P ezymology. Yet he never lets his research prowess overshadow his teaching role.

“OSU has many gifted people and researchers, and many of them know their subjects better than anyone in the country or in the world,” the student wrote. “However, Dr. Gopalan has the ability — the unique ability — to transfer what he knows to his students.”

Gopalan co-developed two early experience honors courses for undergraduates, exposing students to the latest research topics and fostering class discussion with field trips before offering them hands-on research.

He was the founder of and advisor to the Biochemistry Undergraduate Club, which fosters early interaction between students and faculty, and he was a leader in developing the National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates.

Gopalan holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Madras (India) and earned his PhD from the University of New Mexico. He joined the Ohio State faculty in 1998.

Richard Shiels, associate professor of history at the Newark campus  has a way of making history come alive. His enthusiastic and captivating teaching of the American past continually impacts students.

“I wasn’t particularly a fan of history, but after the first class I found that I couldn’t wait to get to the next one,” a student wrote. “The material just wasn’t an assignment — it was living, breathing, happening.” And Shiels’ passion for the past has brought him numerous honors. He is a four-time winner of the Thomas J. Evans Teaching Excellence Award and a 1995 recipient of the Robert A. Barnes Exemplary Teaching Award, both presently awarded by Ohio State faculty.

Shiels takes his passion for history to activities beyond the classroom as well. He successfully advocated for the establishment of the Newark Earthworks Center (NEC), Ohio State’s first scholarly center at a regional campus (of which he currently serves as director). His leadership is largely responsible for not only the success of the NEC, but also for its very existence.

Shiels received his bachelor’s degree from Hope College, his MA in religion from Yale University, and his PhD from Boston University.

The Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes exceptional scholarly accomplishments by senior professors who have compiled a substantial body of research. Arts and Sciences faculty John Mueller, professor, political science, Bradley Peterson, professor and chair, astronomy, and Roger Ratcliff, professor, psychology, are being honored for their scholarly ccomplishments.

John Mueller, professor, political science and Woody Hayes Chair, National Security Studies, is one of the world’s leading scholars on international relations, American foreign policy and security policy whose research focuses on terrorism, nuclear policy and democratic theory, among others. In an unusual twist, he is equally recognized as an authority on dance history.

“Mueller consistently forces us to reconsider and rethink our positions on topics we thought we understood, and to me that is the hallmark of a truly original mind,” said one colleague.

He is the author of 12 political science books (two of them award-winning), and has published more than 100 scholarly and newspaper and magazine articles. He has given hundreds of interviews for print, television and radio. He also directs Ohio State’s Dance Film Archive and is the author of a prize-winning book on Fred Astaire.

Mueller is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.He received his AB from the University of Chicago, his MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He came to Ohio State in 2000.

Over the past decade, Bradley Peterson, professor and chair, astronomy, has been at the forefront in efforts to understand the cosmic history of quasars and galaxies. He has pioneered innovative techniques to study the super massive black holes that reside at the centers of galaxies and power the most luminous objects in the universe — quasars and active galactic nuclei.

Leading observational campaigns that span months or years at observatories around the globe and in space, Peterson measures the flows of gas around black holes and the masses of the black holes themselves, which range from a million to a billion times the mass of our sun. According to one colleague, “(His technique) is the premier, in fact the only, method to estimate black hole masses and to study the accretion mechanisms in galaxies throughout the universe. For this, the entire astronomical community owes Dr. Peterson a huge debt of gratitude.”

Peterson’s research has received continual funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Atmospheric and Space Administration (NASA). He is chair of NASA’s Space Telescope Institute Council, which oversees the Institute that runs the Hubble Space Telescope. He has represented the university on the Association of Universities in Research in Astronomy (AURA) for many years.

His 230 publications, most of them in the field’s most important journals, attest to both his productivity and his impacts. Peterson is also the author of two textbooks. Peterson received his BS in physics from the University of Minnesota and his PhD in astronomy from the University of Arizona. He joined the faculty at Ohio State in 1980.

Roger Ratcliff, Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and professor, psychology, believes that mathematical models of human behavior are a key to understanding how people process information and make decisions. His models have been applied in situations ranging from normal cognitive processing to aging and cognitive deficits. One of his major contributions, the diffusion model of decision making, has had a huge impact on neuroscience, psychology, decision science and systems biology.

“Ratcliff has done more to bring rigor, insight and sophisticated analyses to response time research than any other scientist in the world — he really has no peer,” said one colleague. “The studies in this line of work have moved Roger into a position of world-leading theorist, and his diffusion theory has become the gold standard to which all others must be compared.”

Ratcliff has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and has more than 8,000 citations. He has received prestigious awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Mental Health and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He is on the Institute of Scientific Information’s list of highly-cited researchers — one of only 32 at Ohio State with this status. He received his BS and MS in physics and his PhD in psychology from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He began his career at Ohio State in 2003.

For more information and a complete list of awards, visit http://www.osu.edu/universityawards/