October 2, 2003

Faculty honors

Hans Belting, professor of art history and media theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, will be the 2003-2004 Visiting Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern.

Belting, who studied art history, archaeology and history in Germany and Italy, has taught in the United States at Harvard University and Columbia University. In Germany, he has taught at the universities of Hamburg, Heidelberg and Munich.

In 2000, Belting inaugurated the Academy for Design’s “Anthropology and the Image: Image-Media-Body” research program which combines art history, literary, criticism, philosophy, neurosciences and psychology.

A member of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences, Belting is the author of numerous publications.

Kenneth D. Forbus, professor of computer science and of education and social policy, has been named the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science.

An internationally recognized expert in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Forbus is specifically interested in qualitative reasoning, spatial reasoning and inference engine design. In cognitive science, he is studying how analogy and similarity work, including the roles they play in cognition and learning. He also is using AI techniques to create new types of educational software and computer games.

He is a founder of qualitative physics, the area of artificial intelligence that develops representations and techniques to capture how people reason about the physical world.

The Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation provide the major funding for his research.

Robert A. Linsenmeier, professor of biomedical engineering and of neurobiology and physiology, has been named the Betty and Neison Harris Professor of Teaching Excellence.

Linsenmeier conducts research in the area of retinal physiology with a particular focus on diseases that involve blood circulation to the eye and oxygen transport to the retina. His work has provided insight into diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachment and other conditions that can lead to blindness. The National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health has supported his research continuously since 1983, and he also has funding from the Whitaker Foundation to develop undergraduate and graduate programs in medical imaging.

Linsenmeier is nationally recognized as an expert on biomedical engineering education through his leadership as associate director of the multi-university VaNTH Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies.