October 9, 2003

Faculty honors

Barbara J. O’Keefe, dean of the School of Communication, has been named the Annenberg University Professor.

O’Keefe came to Northwestern in 2000 from the University of Michigan where she was professor in the School of Infor-mation and director of the university’s Media Union, an interdisciplinary center for the study, development and application of emerging digital technologies, especially those designed to support learning, collaboration, visualization and performance.

Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, O’Keefe served 18 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She held joint appointments as a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and as a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She directed the Charles Woolbert Research Laboratory, the Verbal Communication Program and the Advanced Information Technology Laboratory.

Kasturi Haldar, professor of pathology and microbiology-immunology, has been named the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in Pathology.

Haldar is internationally recognized for her work on host/parasite interactions, particularly those of the virulent human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. She has shown that the plasmodial Golgi has novel dynamics and selectively exports a resident compartment to develop a network of tubulo-vesicular membrane structures in the cytoplasm of host red cells. This network provides a nutrient transport pathway connecting the parasite to extracellular plasma.

Researchers also are studying how proteins and lipids are moved to vacuoles of intracellular bacteria such as Salmonella. They have demonstrated that statins are effective at blocking bacterial infections and may provide new therapies for treating infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria.

Wing Kam Liu, professor of mechanical engineering, has been named the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

A leading scholar in computational mechanics, Liu has made fundamental contributions to finite element methods, meshfree methods, computational methods for multi-scale problems and computational nanomechanics. His work has had a wide impact on the field.

Liu’s research has earned him the Computational Mechanics Award from the International Association for Computational Mechanics, the Computational Structural Mechanics Award from the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), the Thomas J. Jaeger Prize from the International Association of Structural Mechanics and the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the American Society of Automotive Engineers.