Reforming Advancement through University Professions  
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RAMP-Up! Career Campaign Awards: Year One Kick-Off Initiative

At the individual level, RAMP-Up initiated a Career Campaign Award Initiative to assist pre- and post-tenure track women faculty in their career advancement through mentor-mentee relationships. The initiative advanced support for both research and career development.

The Call for Proposals in Year One resulted in seven awards to faculty at the Asssistant and Associate Professor ranks. Winners received their Awards at the Kick-Off event Celebrating Women's Advancement in the Academy. Pictured at right: President Shirley Jackson presents a Career Campaign Award to Associate Professor Audrey Bennett. Other awardees are profiled below:

Dr. Jackson and Bennett
Year One Awardees
 

Professor Audrey Bennett, Associate Professor, Graphics and Communication Design. Has worked with mentor Dean John Harrington in Humanities and Social Sciences on extending her professional growth through presentations, appearances and discourse in her area of specialization. She is exploring interactive technologies that facilitate participation with remote participants at various stages of the design process. These technologies may help facilitate audience input and function like usability tests on the effectiveness of an existing prototype. She is editor of Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design to be published by Princeton Architectural Press and her articles have been published in Design Issues, Journal of Design Research, Visible Language, The Journal of Graphic Design, and The Education of a Graphic Designer.
Audrey Bennett
   
Blanca Barquera, Assistant Professor, Biology joined Rensselaer in 2004. Has worked with Angel Garcia as a mentor, pursuing international recognition for her research and publications. She has worked extensively in research, examining the external propagation of cholera bacterium with a team of graduate reseachers. Of particular interest to her team is sodium metabolism, which plays an important role in the adaptation of Vibrio cholerae to different conditions. Barquera’s group aims to understand the changes in patterns of gene expression responsible for this adaptation; a second focus of this research is the mechanistic enzymology of sodium metabolism. As an outcome of the Career Campaign, Professor Barquera presented her work at the Gordon Research Conference. She has co-authored many articles on the cholera bacterium. Professor Barquera has also been awarded an NIH Fogarty Fellowship, hosted summer students from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in her lab and coordinated their research presentations at a two-day Rensselaer symposium.
Profesor Blanca Barquera
   

Professor Jan Fernheimer, Assistant Professor, Humanities and Social Science, has conducted research on black and Jewish identity studies. Her mentor through the Career Campaign is departmental colleague Katya Haskins. Professor Fernheimer is writing a book tracing the history of Jewish rhetorical and pedagogical traditions, an article that explores how new technologies -- blogs (web logs), wikis, and portfolio-based assessment -- affect writing classroom practices, and an article investigating how rhetorical theory might deepen our understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict. An anthology in which her work appears has recently received "The Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, 2007" awarded to the best anthology about African American women's history: Speaking Our Minds: Black Women’s Thought in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway. Her essay, “Arguing from Difference: Cooper, Emerson, Guizot, and a More Harmonious America,” appears on pages 287-305.