April 24, 2023 - Three 2023 Lantis Award Recipients Announced

Dear Campus Community,

I am pleased to announce the selection of three faculty members as 2023 Lantis Endowed University Chairs. The recipients are Hannah Burdette, Languages and Cultures; Christine Leistner, Public Health and Health Services Administration; and Jackson Webster, Civil Engineering. Their selection follows rigorous analysis of a very competitive applicant pool, and each will receive a financial award to advance their research and student-centered projects.

Interim Provost Steve Perez and I thank members of the Lantis University Chair Selection Committee for their time and expertise in choosing this year’s recipients for this prestigious honor.

Dr. Burdette will advance her research and teaching on comparative, inter-American Indigenous studies in two main areas. First, she will research and write a book titled Indigenous Wonderworks: Worldbuilding Stories of Native América, which considers how authors of different backgrounds draw on Indigenous stories. Second, she plans to bring a Tzotzil Maya poet to campus to collaborate with students in a 400-level seminar. She and her students will translate the author’s work from Spanish to English and then host a trilingual poetry reading and share their translations on a public blog. Both of these projects aim to bring greater visibility and access to a significantly underrepresented body of writing. Burdette’s research helps to address a real need for more translations and comparative analysis in order to promote dialogue across linguistic, ethnic, and national boundaries throughout the Americas

With her Lantis award, Dr. Leistner plans to complete a body of work related to diverse parents and sexual well-being. She has multiple research projects on LGBTQ+ parents and sexuality in progress and plans to complete manuscripts for publication, apply for grants funding new projects to fill gaps in the literature on this subject, and to involve students in this work through paid research positions in her lab. The Lantis Award will allow her to focus on completing these research projects in their varied stages and help develop this unique body of work that will significantly contribute to sex science among diverse parents.

Dr. Webster will use the award to advance his research on the impact of wildfire on water quality. Over the past four years, he has studied the long-term changes to our region’s water resources following megafires and attempted to answer public health questions for North State residents, community groups, state agencies, and the broader scientific community. His project will build on previous work by quantifying particular classes of thermogenic organic molecules in ash and runoff using a newly acquired high pressure liquid chromatography instrument. The Lantis Award will expand Webster’s research capability through method development while bringing this research to civil engineering students by training them on the use of new analytical instrumentation in the environmental engineering lab. Data on post-fire contaminant transport and the effects on public health remain widely unavailable and this proposed work is important for characterizing the ongoing effects of wildfire on our water resources.

Please join me in congratulating Professors Burdette, Leistner, and Webster on their Lantis Awards. We look forward to hearing more about their endeavors as their projects transpire.

Professor David Lantis was a faculty member of the Department of Geography who understood that private giving would help to enrich the teaching and learning environment of the University. Professor Lantis and his wife, Helen, donated $2 million to endow a University Chair in their name, and this endowment allows for the annual funding of University Chairs. Past recipients of the Lantis University Chair include Amanda Banet, Eric Bartelink, Brian Brazeal, Tracy Butts, Troy Cline, David Colson, Michael Ennis, Chiara Ferrari, Sergei Fomin, Georgia Fox, Greg Kallio, Nik Janos, Stephen Lewis, Donald Miller, Michelle Neyman Morris, Susan Roll, Monica C. So, Rachel Teasdale, Kate Transchel, Lori Beth Way, Byron Wolfe, Najm Yousefi, Jinsong Zhang and Kun Zhang.

Sincerely,
Gayle E. Hutchinson