The Wayne State University Board of Governors has announced the winners of the 2002 Charles H. Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Awards-- Rebecca Treiman, college of science professor in the department of psychology, and Anca Vlasopolos, college of liberal arts professor in the department of English.

These fellowships were created to recognize and provide support for members of the faculty whose continuing achievements and current activities in scholarship, research or in the fine and performing arts, are nationally distinguished.

Treiman, who lives in Pleasant Ridge, is an internationally renowned scholar and leader in her field. Her research has been consistently well funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the March of Dimes. Since1997, she has senior authored nine book chapters, published 16 articles in prestigious peer review journals and co-authored nine other articles. She has also published her work in applied journals in an attempt to disseminate her findings on children's reading and spelling skills to teachers, teacher educators, and speech pathologists.

In 1992, Treiman received a Gershenson Award for her work on phonological awareness and its role on the acquisition of literacy in children. Since that time, her research has shifted to focus on the role of memorization in the acquisition of the ability to read. This Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Award will be used to further her research on the cognitive and linguistic processes involved in learning to read and write.

Vlasopolos, who lives in Grosse Pointe, is an accomplished scholar and creative writer. She has written a murder mystery, two volumes of verse, an internationally acclaimed memoir, and nearly one hundred poems published in a variety of journals both nationally and internationally.

Her scholarship focuses on the English novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Romanticism, the fiction of Virginia Woolf, and comparative literature. She has read or had her work presented throughout the US and Great Britain.

Last year her memoir, No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement, was published. This book concerns Vlasopolos's own experience as a Jewish girl in Romania, forced to flee the country in the company of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor who emerges as the heroine of the book. Dr. Vlasopolos is now deeply involved in writing a historically based novel, Ring of Fire, which will focus on the tale of the near extinction of the albatross on the island of Torishima off the Japanese coast. The Distinguished Faculty Fellowship will assist her in defraying the costs of travel to Asia and to New England for historical research essential to complete this book.

The Charles H. Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellowships are part of the benefaction to the University by Charles H. Gershenson who formerly served on the Board of Governors. The term of each fellowship is two years. Since1985, 49 Charles Gershenson Fellowships and 53 Board of Governors Fellowships have been awarded.