Photo by Kanji Takeno

Collaborative excellence

TU professor and UMBC colleague to be recognized for research partnership

By Jan Lucas

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents will award David Schaefer, Elkins Professor of Physics, its highest honor for exemplary faculty achievement.

The Board of Regents will recognize Schaefer and Mark Marten, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at UMBC, with its 2007 Faculty Award for Collaboration. The honor recognizes an ongoing scholarly partnership that has reaped substantial benefits not only for the two professors, but also for their respective institutions and students.

Each year the Regents bestow up to 15 awards in five categories—teaching, mentoring, public service, scholarship/research/creative activity, and collaboration—to USM faculty members. This year’s awards will be presented at the board’s April 13 public session, to be held at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

David Vanko, chairperson of the Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences, nominated Schaefer for the award. In his letter to the selection committee, Vanko characterized the quality and quantity of research that has come out of the Schaefer/Marten partnership as “extraordinary.”

Schaefer says he met Marten about five years ago when the UMBC professor discovered his Web site—and his interest in atomic force microscopy. Marten proposed that the two collaborate in a multidisciplinary effort that also involved a UMBC doctoral candidate and TU undergraduates.

 “We’d never met before," Schaefer says, "but our personalities clicked immediately.”

"Dr. Marten is involved in fungi research,” he says. “He has a big vat of ‘fungal soup’ from which he extracts by-products for the pharmaceutical industry. In the nanotechnology lab, I can measure the fungi at selected points to see how strong they are. Those measurements are very useful, and they’re obtainable only with the equipment in our lab.

“He’s looking at the biology, basically, and I’m looking at the mechanical properties and surface features.”  

The Schaefer/Marten collaboration has attracted National Science Foundation support, with several grants awarded to the pair over the years.

“It has been an equal partnership and a very fruitful one,” Schaefer adds. “I see us working together for a long time,”

With the recent addition of a third collaborator at the University of Nebraska and a second UMBC doctoral candidate, Schaefer and Marten are branching into other areas, including genetic research.

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