Three faculty named Distinguished Professors

Two faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and one in the School of Pharmacy have been named Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors.

Those receiving the honor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences were: Diane Lillo-Martin, a professor of linguistics and former department head; and Gregory Anderson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who stepped down last year as vice provost for research and graduate education and dean of the Graduate School.

Anderson is currently serving a one-year appointment as graduate dean in residence at the Council of Graduate Schools and the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In the School of Pharmacy, Diane Burgess, a national expert in drug delivery systems and a professor of pharmaceutics, is now a distinguished professor.

The board announced the honors April 21 in recognition of the professors’ “exceptional distinction in scholarship, teaching, and service while at UConn.”

Diane Lillo-Martin. Photo by Daniel Buttrey

Lillo-Martin studies how children acquire their native language. Her latest research focuses on young children who are learning both spoken and sign language, so-called “bimodal bilinguals.”

Some children have two deaf parents who sign, and those youngsters do not have difficulty acquiring spoken as well as sign language, she says.

“They are amazing in their ability to go back and forth with languages – they learn so much, so fast,” says Lillo-Martin, who came to UConn in 1986 and serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Language Acquisition.

By using American Sign Language with signers and spoken language with speakers, the children learn to appropriately alternate between the two. Children and adults who know both languages also sometimes use them simultaneously; this is known as “code blending.”

Lillo-Martin also has a new project studying language acquisition by deaf children with a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to those who are deaf or profoundly hard of hearing.

Sign language can actually help children learn spoken language, she theorizes; deaf children can learn through sign language while they are being taught the spoken language.

Anderson’s research on the origin and evolution of domesticated plants and in conservation biology and biodiversity has taken him around the world. He has field experience in Costa Rica and the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, Australia, Spain, and South Africa.

One of the areas Anderson studies – the reproductive biology of island plants – involves a serious conservation problem, he says, particularly on oceanic islands if only one seed is deposited. Effective conservation requires understanding all elements of biology, including conserving plant pollinators so that plants can survive past the current generation.

The conservation problem of islands is being extended to land spaces on continents, too, says Anderson, who came to UConn in1973 and was named a Distinguished Alumni Professor in 1997. As native forests and plants diminish – prairie plants in the Midwest, for example – the land is left with “continental islands” where the need for conserving plant and animal species is similar to that on oceanic islands.