Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching
John W. Moore
Chemistry Department
and
Michael J. Smith
Industrial Engineering Department

Bollinger Academic Staff Distinguished Achievement Award
Mark O. Swandby
Engineering Physics Department

Byron Bird Award for Excellence in a Research Publication
James D. Callen
Engineering Physics Department

John Moore (21K JPG)

His colleagues describe him as prolific, innovative, an outstanding educator, a mentor and a leader. Chemistry Professor John Moore's students praise his personal, energetic and engaging teaching style.

Moore excels at motivating students and encouraging a learning environment. "Although I was sitting in a lecture hall with over 300 people, the class seemed as personal and interactive as a class of 20 people," says one student.

Moore's excellence in teaching also stems from the "extras," says a colleague. He presents information via multimedia, incorporates chemical demonstrations into every lecture, and develops CDs for students so that they have relevant, up-to-date chemical software resources and tools.

His influence on chemistry education doesn't end in the classroom. As head of the chemistry department's general chemistry program, Moore has transformed both the laboratory courses, which emphasize experiments that enable students to discover chemical principles, and the way they are taught. He modeled new teaching methods and mentored faculty on how to teach large freshman lecture courses that actively involve students. And he developed a training program that transfers these approaches to teaching assistants.

Nationally, Moore is director of the Institute for Chemical Education and editor of the Journal of Chemical Education, for which publication he developed the Journal of Chemical Education-Software, which publishes peer-reviewed instructional software. He was principal investigator on a multi-university, $3.6 million NSF initiative to bring active learning methods to the chemistry curriculum and is co-author of one of the most successful general-chemistry textbooks, Chemistry: The Molecular Science. In 1982 he founded Project SERAPHIM, which collects, evaluates and distributes educational software throughout the country. At present, he heads an NSF-sponsored initiative to create a national science library for access to web-based instructional materials.

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Chemical Society, National Science Teachers Association, and Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers, among others.

Michael J. Smith (33K JPG)

"Best professor I have ever had." "I enjoyed going to class." "Thought-provoking." "Real-life examples were valuable." Comments such as these regularly appear in student evaluations of Professor Michael J. Smith.

To engage students with human-factors, organizational management, ergonomics, and other issues, he presents a melange of videotapes, websites, slides, overheads and personal anecdotes. And though his courses often draw as many as 100 students, Smith wanders into the aisles to talk with them about the ideas they're learning. "We discuss, argue, comment, agree, disagree, complain and laugh," he says.

This hands-on, student-centered, "active-learning" approach is so successful that many of Smith's colleagues regard him as a mentor and seek to emulate his style. "Watching him teach, you see how he is able to be interactive with a class of 70-plus students and how the students try to participate as much as possible," says one faculty member. "He continuously challenges the students while making the learning experience pleasant and interesting," says another.

During his 18 years in the college, Smith has advised 80 master's and PhD students. Recently, a group of those students honored him with a surprise party and an award for excellence in holistic education. "He respects you as an equal and gives you the freedom to explore your interests, challenge his ideas and talk to other professors. His door is always open," says a former PhD student.

In Smith's view, that open-door policy is crucial to students' out-of-classroom experiences with faculty. During the past 15 years, he has spent about 15 hours a week meeting with undergraduate and graduate students about assignments, theses, career counseling and more.

Smith, who earned his PhD in industrial psychology from UW-Madison and worked 13 years in industry before joining the industrial engineering faculty, also regularly volunteers to teach additional classes to ensure coverage of critical courses.

He has received Polygon Engineering Council Outstanding Teaching Awards in 14 of the last 18 years. The industrial engineering undergraduate honor society, Alpha Pi Mu, named him 2002 instructor of the year and in 1991, the Wisconsin Student Association chose Smith as one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's top-100 teachers.

Mark Swandby (13K JPG)

As a registered professional engineer with an MBA and experience in the nuclear power industry, Mark Swandby is uniquely qualified to serve as administrator for the Department of Engineering Physics. In fact, his title does not quite capture the value of his performance.

"Mark's title was 'Assistant to-,' but it could reasonably have been 'Assistant Chair' or even 'Associate Chair,'" says Emeritus Professor and former nuclear engineering department chair Max Carbon. "Certainly, he performed duties handled by faculty members in many departments."

Swandby's duties are far reaching. He says his philosophy of being an administrator is to support the faculty "…so that they can do what they should be doing — teaching and research — to serve as a bulwark against the tide of university paperwork. Try to never say no, to figure out a way to accomplish what the faculty need, legally, ethically, within whatever rules and regulations apply to a given situation."

Over the years, there have been many situations. He is responsible for detailed preparation and monitoring of the department budget and plays a major role in hiring and supervising departmental classified staff. Having earned his BS in nuclear engineering from the department in 1972 and worked in the Dresden nuclear power plant of Commonwealth Edison, he had the perfect background to serve as an advisor to students. This ultimately earned him the informal title of "Big Brother" of nuclear engineering undergraduates.

Since 1995, when nuclear engineering and engineering physics merged with the engineering mechanics department to become the Department of Engineering Physics, Swandby has concentrated on the management of the combined departments. Prior to the merger the two departments had 7.8 total support staff, today it has 4.8, including Swandby.

In addition to having served as assistant to the director of the Fusion Technology Institute and the Phaedrus Laboratory for Plasma Science, he chaired and continues to serve on many college and university administrative committees.

Swandby and his wife have two children. In his free time, he enjoys curling and serves on numerous committees including the United States Curling Association and the West Side Swim Club. He is active in the Midvale Community Lutheran Church.

James D. Callen (17K JPG)

James Callen is the recipient of the 2003 Byron Bird Award for his contributions to the theoretical prediction and experimental identification of neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) in controlled fusion plasmas. NTMs are now recognized as a major potential obstacle to operation of a tokamak fusion reactor.

A tokamak is essentially a toroidal magnetic bottle used for holding high-temperature plasma. The magnetic fields are produced by a combination of currents flowing in external coils and currents flowing within the plasma itself. Researchers have been studying tokamaks for more than 50 years with the goal of creating a suitable magnetic bottle for a stable, sustained fusion reaction — a problem that has been compared to trying to hold Jell-O with rubber bands.

NTMs are one of the most serious instabilities in a steady-state high-performance tokamak plasma. The instability produces macroscopically large deformations which lead to confinement degradation and, in some cases, termination of the plasma discharge. Callen developed the theory of these instabilities in a series of papers primarily with his postdoctoral students in 1985. Callen, Chris Hegna (now Associate Professor of Engineering Physics) and other co-authors then detailed the phenomenology in a series of papers throughout the early 1990s. Callen, and Z. Chang also developed models for quantifying the energy confinement degradation due to magnetic islands and applied the theory to Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) plasmas. Subsequently, Chang, Callen, Hegna and colleagues at Princeton reported definitive experimental evidence of the instability in a 1995 paper, now considered a classic. To a large degree, most of the present research on NTMs builds upon the original interpretation and theoretical insights introduced by Callen and his postdocs.

Callen earned his PhD in nuclear engineering in 1968 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. After three years on the MIT faculty and seven years with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Departments of Engineering Physics (then Nuclear Engineering) and Physics in 1979. Callen is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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