KU News Release

Four professors win $10,000 Higuchi Research Achievement Awards

Michael H. Crawford

Craig Huneke

James Shortridge

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has announced the winners of four Higuchi/Endowment Association Research Achievement Awards. The winners will receive $10,000 to advance research efforts.

The awards were announced Sept. 7 at KU’s annual faculty-staff convocation. Chancellor Robert Hemenway will officially present the awards to the winners in November.

— Michael H. Crawford, professor of anthropology, will receive the Balfour S. Jeffrey Award for achievement in the humanities and social sciences.

— Craig Huneke, Henry J. Bischoff Professor of Mathematics, will receive the Olin K. Petefish Award for achievement in the basic sciences.

— Gary Conrad, University Distinguished Professor of Biology at Kansas State University, will receive the Dolph Simons Award for achievement in the biological sciences.

— James Shortridge, professor of geography, will receive the Irvin E. Youngberg Award for research achievement in the applied sciences.

The Higuchi awards were established in 1981 by Takeru Higuchi, a KU distinguished professor of chemistry and pharmacy and chair of the pharmaceutical chemistry department, and his wife, Aya. Higuchi stipulated that faculty members at all Kansas regents institutions be eligible. The annual awards are named for former officers of KU Endowment who were instrumental in bringing Higuchi to KU and who worked to further KU’s overall research program. Recipients may use their awards for research materials, summer salaries, fellowship matching funds, research assistance or other research-related support.

Michael H. Crawford
Crawford has been a member of the faculty at KU since 1971. He is a leading scholar in anthropological genetics. His research focuses in part on the application of genetics to resolve historical controversies, peopling of the Americas, genetic and demographic consequences of culture contacts in Siberia and the New World and genetic and environmental interactions involving chronic diseases and differential biological aging of mid-western Mennonites.

Crawford earned a doctorate in biological anthropology and genetics from the University of Washington. He is a Fulbright fellow to the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta and in 2001 was inducted into the Argentine Academy of Sciences, the oldest academy of sciences in the Americas.

Craig Huneke
Huneke (pronounced Hew-nuh-key) has taught at KU since 1999. He is an international leader in commutative algebra. His research works toward solutions of systems of polynomial and power series equations.

Huneke earned a doctorate from Yale University in 1978. He was a Fulbright scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany, and is one of the top 250 most cited mathematicians in the world. He won the G. Bailey Price Teaching Award at KU and earlier this year was elected to the Council of the American Mathematical Society.

Gary Conrad
Conrad has been a member of the faculty at Kansas State University since 1971 and was appointed a University Distinguished Professor in 1998. He is a leading scientist in cellular and developmental biology. His research focuses on how arrangements of charged, complex sugar-linked proteins and collagen fibers direct the cornea of the eye to become and remain transparent and more highly innervated than the skin that covers the rest of the body.

Conrad earned a doctorate from Yale University in 1968. He received the $100,000 Alcon Research Institute Annual Award in 1996 and has had continuous funding from the National Institute of Health’s National Eye Institute for 36 years. He also has been a regular summer researcher at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine, where he studies shark, skate and scallop corneas.

James Shortridge
Shortridge has been a member of the KU faculty since 1972. He is a leading scholar in Midwest, Plains and Kansas culture history. He studies historical and cultural geography, with an emphasis on the construction of regional identity and sense of place. His 1989 book The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, won the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers for the best book in American geography.

Shortridge received a doctorate from KU in 1972. He was the Zimmerman Memorial Lecturer, Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor at Dartmouth College and has received a Distinguished Teacher Award and a W. T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence at KU.

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