Five faculty members retire

April 17, 2007
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ANN ARBOR ?

Five University of Michigan faculty members were given the emeritus title by the U-M Regents at their Jan. 21 meeting.

Those retiring are Patricia M. Aldridge, assistant librarian in the English Language Institute; Bruce M. Hill, professor of statistics; Barbara B. Murray, associate professor of business economics and finance at the U-M-Dearborn; Ronald H. Olsen, professor of microbiology and immunology; and Edward M. Schwartz, associate professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases.

Aldridge joined the Linguistics/ELI Library in 1983. “This library, which specializes in holdings in linguistics and English as a second language, contains more than 4,000 volumes, in addition to a number of specialized collections and 45 serials,” the Regents noted. “Ms. Aldridge’s specialized knowledge of these holdings has made her an important local, regional, and state consultant. Throughout her tenure at the University, she maintained a strong link with the journal Language Learning to the benefit of all parties. She played a key role in the creation of the first edition of the ‘ITA Annotated Bibliography’; more recently, she has been heavily involved in supporting the English as a Second Language Program for migrant farm workers.”

Prof. Hill, who joined the U-M faculty in 1960, “has conducted research in a number of different areas, including Bayesian nonparametric statistics, the probabilistic theory of urn processes, modeling of long-tailed distributions such as the Zipf-Pareto law, inference about the tail of a distribution, variance components models in a random effects model, decision theory, and the likelihood principle. The article in which he proposed what is now called the Hill tail-index estimator is widely cited and his estimator is applied in a variety of substantive areas dealing with extreme values.”

Prof. Murray, who joined the U-M-Dearborn faculty in 1978, “helped to develop the economics and financial institutions curriculum,” the Regents said. “Because of her professional activities in industry, she was able to bring to the classroom practical experience, especially in banking. This enriched her students’ classroom experience and made the courses meaningful to them. Within the School of Management, Prof. Murray served terms as chair of the Department of Economics and Finance and as director of graduate programs. She was also actively involved in business and industry and served on the board of various regional professional associations.”

Prof. Olsen joined the U-M faculty in 1965. “His research has included studies of low temperature effects on cellular growth; evolution and epidemiology of antibiotic resistance; isolation and characterization of bacteria which degrade environmental compounds and their synthetic analogues; and biochemical genetics of metal working fluid microorganisms. His many seminal contributions to his field have been documented in numerous scientific journal articles, book chapters, and monographs. He was a mentor for doctoral students and teacher of undergraduate, graduate, medical, dental, and pharmacy students.”

Prof. Schwartz joined the U-M faculty in 1966. “His early research focused on problems of children adopted in infancy. His work led to one of the earliest research studies and publications in this area, and provided some of the impetus for opening up adoption records to adoptees and for studying the long-term impact of the adoption process on adoptees. For the past 30 years, Prof. Schwartz has followed patients with neurometabolic disorders and in the process, has contributed to identifying cognitive/learning and behavioral patterns and risks in these populations of children with phenylketonuria, galactosemia and maple syrup urine disease.”

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