Two LAS Professors Awarded 2013 Researcher of the Year Honor
Two LAS professors have been named among the UIC Researcher of the Year award recipients for 2013. This annual honor recognizes efforts and commitment of researchers who have demonstrated outstanding research achievements to advance the knowledge in their field of expertise.
Congratulations first go to Samuel Fleischacker, professor in the LAS Department of Philosophy.
Professor Fleischacker is a prolific scholar who has produced two major books in different sub-fields in the past three years which bring philosophy to bear upon current societal issues helping to inform political debate. What is Enlightenment? explores the legacy of Kant's essay by that name, arguing that it helps all of us, including traditional religious believers, recognize the importance of a pluralist, open, secular and liberal politics and public morality. Divine Teaching and the Way of the World explores similar questions from within the standpoint of religious belief. These works make important contributions to the history of ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of religion. His most recent work brings attention to similar tensions affecting the relationship between nationalism and multicultural toleration. Leading scholars have called his recent work "brilliant" and "a major contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion." He was awarded a highly competitive fellowship at Stanford's Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in 2013 and in 2012 there was a session devoted to "Divine Teaching" at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
Professor Izzet Coskin, of the mathematics department, has received the rising star award, for early career researchers who have demonstrated outstanding promise to become future leaders in their area of expertise.
Professor Coskun is considered one of the best young algebraic geometers in the country today as demonstrated by prestigious grant awards like the NSF CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship. Coskun has been cited by leading scholars for significant and original solutions to difficult classical problems and for introducing important new techniques into some of the very established areas in the field, including branches of moduli theory, combinatorics and representation theory, and Gromov-Witten theory, which lies at the interface of algebraic geometry and theoretical physics. Scholars at Rice are already working on new research problems building on his breakthrough collaboration "The minimal model program for the Hilbert scheme of points on the plane and Bridgeland Stability."
An awards ceremony in honor of the 2013 recipients of the UIC Researchers of the Year Award will be held February 27 from 3:30-6 p.m. in the Michele M. Thompson Rooms of the UIC Student Center West at 828 South Wolcott Avenue.