Three UC Davis faculty members will receive Academic Senate awards honoring their dedication to teaching and to mentoring graduate students.

Graduate Mentoring Award recipients are James Wilen of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Biswanath Mukherjee of the Department of Computer Science. Krishnan Nambiar, of the Department of Chemistry, was chosen for the Distinguished Teaching Award.

The recipients were to be announced at an Academic Senate Representative Assembly meeting Thursday (after Dateline's deadline). Wilen, Mukherjee and Nambiar were selected based on criteria ranging from how they encourage intellectual growth, offer accessibility to students, and demonstrate quality scholarship.

James Wilen

James Wilen specializes in natural resource and environmental economics. Before arriving at UC Davis in 1979 he served in the economics departments at the Universities of British Columbia and Washington. In 1973, he received his doctorate from UC Riverside.

"He is arguably the national leader in training resource economists," wrote nominator Marcia Weinberg, an economist with the USDA and former doctoral student. "It is easier to count the number of major agricultural and resource economics programs that do not include his students among their faculty than to count those that do."

Tu Jarvis, chair of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, said Wilen has advised a large number of doctoral students -- 26 to date -- and has been generous in offering advice to other students not directly supervised by him. He also has served on 17 doctoral committees, including others outside the department.

"Jim has had unusual success in his mentoring activities, again reflecting the attention he has paid individual students," said Jarvis, noting that a large number of Wilen's doctoral students have won awards for the quality of their research.

In 1998, Wilen received the American Agricultural Economics Association's national award for his distinguished graduate teaching. In addition, an article he co-wrote, "A Model of Regulated Open Access Resource Use" for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Manage-ment, was honored for the quality of its research discovery and received an honorable mention for outstanding published research.

Biswanath Mukherjee

Biswanath Mukherjee conducts research in the areas of lightwave networks, network intrusion detection, and wireless networks. He earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of Washington in 1987 and began working at UC Davis the same year.

Mukherjee has supervised 18 doctoral students who have completed their degrees. Several of his students have been nominated for the College of Engineering's "best dissertation" award, and his students typically achieve a high rate of productivity, publishing from three to five journals per year. Mukherjee also has run a research seminar in computer networks each quarter.

"He does a very good job of organizing these seminars, including selecting a good choice of papers to cover," wrote computer science professor Charles Martel in his nomination.

When Mukherjee was the computer science department chair in the late 1990s, he managed a two-day workshop for doctoral students on how to prepare to become a faculty member.

Mukherjee always recognizes his students' research work and helps them prepare for their careers, said Martel. "Mukherjee actively involves himself in the job-hunting process of his students," he added.

Krishnan Nambiar

Krishnan Nambiar was hired in 1987 after working as a research fellow at Harvard University. He received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of New Brunswick, Canada. His interests include organic synthesis, DNA, and designing organic molecules that act as enzyme mimics.

He has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, including the Chemistry 128 series, Chemistry 118C and Chemistry 237, as well as classes numbering more than 400 students.

Nambiar has developed into one of the finest teachers in the chemistry department, wrote chemistry professor Neil Schore in his nomination. "He explores new and innovative means of teaching chemistry concepts and principles. I have personally sat in on his lectures and can attest to their organization, clarity and rigor," Schore wrote.

Nambiar also is an undergraduate student advisor and has served on numerous undergraduate scholarship committees. Schore wrote that Nambiar "spends an extraordinary amount of time mentoring undergraduate students in research," and has spurred the department's undergraduate research efforts, adding: "He has been praised by students for his supportive and patient approach to mentoring."