Five professors, recipients of Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Awards, were honored at the fifth annual Academic Convocation April 28. The faculty members will receive a citation, engraved plaque and unrestricted grant of $2,500 at the June 12 Board of Governors meeting.
The awards were established in 1974 to recognize regular full-time faculty who have distinguished themselves through a particular accomplishment during the previous academic year. Since then, 123 faculty have received the award.
The recipients include Marc Kruman, history; Christopher Leland, English; Boris Mordukhovich, mathematics; David Weinberg, history; and Yang Zhao, electrical and computer engineering.
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Marc Kruman
Marc Kruman was honored for the publication of his book Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America.
The book explores the process of constitution-making in the original 13 states and demonstrates that the framers created a distinctively American science of politics even before the end of the Confederation period.
Part of an ambitious project of a study of suffrage from the Revolution to the Civil War, the book reveals how state conventions and congresses constructed constitutions that limited the powers of legislatures, not just those of executive branches. Kruman's analysis emphasizes the state constitution makers' commitment to "democracy" and challenges other historians who have emphasized the founders' commitment to a "republican" form of government.
Kruman, chairman of the history department, has been at Wayne State since 1975 and has received many awards including a Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award in 1985 for Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865; thePresident's Award for Excellence in Teaching; a Humanities Center Research Award; and a Barber Research Award from the Center for Legal Studies. He also has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was a Mellon Fellow at Harvard. Two of his articles have won the best-article-of-the-year competition from leading historical journals.
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Christopher Leland 
Christopher Leland is recognized for the publication of his fifth and most recent novel, Letting Loose, a novel of remembrance, re-evaluation and reconciliation.
The book's characters are people whose lives have veered apart since the late1960s but who are brought together for the funeral of Bobbo Starwick, whose remains have come home 25 years after he was declared missing in action in Vietnam. Centered in the five days before the funeral in the remembrances of Bobbo's family and people whose lives he touched, the book is a social history of the 1960s made most personal as Bobbo's gay half-brother, his former girlfriend, a fellow Vietnam veteran and his parents cope with what has gone unspoken and what has changed since the war.
For readers who also were scarred by those times it is a painful book, but one filled with characters who cannot be dismissed. It is a book that dares to be cynical, while facing private decimations wreaked by the Vietnam War and theAIDS epidemic. It reminds readers of the courage of those left behind, those whose names will not be found on any monument or quilt, but whose lives have also been carved and stitched by those times.
Leland has been a faculty member in the English department since 1990. He previously taught at Pomona College, University of California at San Diego, Harvard University and Bennington College. A Fulbright scholar, Leland mostrecently taught in Spain at the University of Madrid. At WSU he has served as co-director and acting director of the creative writing program. He received a Distinguished Faculty Award in 1997.
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Boris Mordukhovich 
Boris Mordukhovich is recognized for the development and applications of the new mathematical tool nonsmooth analysis.
His accomplishment came to maturity during the 1996-97 academic year and resulted in a series of eight articles on the subject. The articles have brought both Mordukhovich and Wayne State University great prestige in the scientific community.
In classical analysis, graphing position vs. time gives a "smooth" curve. Newton invented calculus to study the associated motion. Over the span of 280years, Newtonian calculus has evolved into a major branch of mathematics known as "analysis" or "smooth analysis." Many problems in optimization, control, game theory, equilibrium, mathematical economics and other areas are essentially nonsmooth. An example is the problem of determining the best portfolio of stocks an investor should possess at a given moment in order to optimize his return. Instead of looking for a single stock, a subset of the Standard and Poor's Index of unknown size is desired.
Traditional mathematical analysis, based on the classical differential calculus of smooth functions, can't be successfully employed in solving such problems and will not provide practical implementation. Nonsmooth analysis has emerged from the need to solve these problems and Mordukhovich has made fundamental contributions to this area.
Mordukhovich came to Wayne State in 1989 as a mathematician who was renowned for quality of scholarship and productivity. The accomplishments of his research career include two monographs, two patents and more than 100 refereed papers that appear in scientific journals. He has earned continued support by the National Science Foundation; holds membership on four editorial boards; and has been the keynote speaker at many international conferences.
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David Weinberg 
David Weinberg, director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies and professor of history, is honored for his book Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am and the Shaping of Jewish Identity.
The setting of the monograph for which Weinberg is being recognized is the historiography of 19th century Russian Jewry. The central theme is the community racial transformation from a society steeped in the tenets of rabbinic Judaism to an activist and self-assertive collectivity.
Far from a sudden and desperate response to an externally imposed crisis, Weinberg argues that the process of ideological and political modernization among Russian Jews was gradual and complex, extending over a number of generations and characterized by a long period in which adherence to and rejection of Jewish tradition existed side by side within the community and often within the consciousness of individuals themselves.
Early reviews of the book have been highly favorable; it has been described as "a thoughtful and well-researched study" as well as "a balanced and thought-provoking study."
Weinberg has been in his current position at Wayne State University since1994. He was awarded a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1971 and was on the faculty at Bowling Green State University from1971-1995. He has published more than 30 articles and been a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, University of Pennsylvania, Hebrew University, University of Michigan, and Spertus College of Judaica.
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Yang Zhao 
Yang Zhao is recognized for his groundbreaking work reported in the paper "Microwave Induced Transparency in Ruby."
The nominated article was published in Physical Review Letters, one of the premier journals in the world that provides rapid publication of important fundamental research which has the potential of leading to developments with significant consequences.
Zhao's work has demonstrated for the first time in solids that microwave radiation can temporarily make ruby lasing materials more transparent. The implications of this discovery are remarkable. It could lead to new kinds of optical switching systems and to simplified ways of making optical, super sum-miniature random access memories (RAM). This discovery also has the potential of leading to the means of making solid state lasers that operate at much lower thresholds than currently conceived and of making frequency-tunable solid state lasers.
Zhao has been a member of the WSU faculty since 1989. His area of research expertise is quantum optics focusing on development of ultra fast information processing using quantum electronics. The excellence of his scholarship has been recognized externally by the award of prestigious grants from various funding agencies and internally through the awarding of a Wayne State University Career Development Chair Award in 1997-98.