4:24 p.m., Aug. 11, 2009----Three faculty in the University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences have been appointed to named professorships, effective Sept. 1. Patricia DeLeon has been appointed Trustees Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences, Joyce Hill Stoner has been named Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor in Material Culture, and Susan Strasser is the new Richards Chair of American History.

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"I am proud to announce these distinctions which have been conferred on three prominent members of our faculty,” UD Provost Tom Apple said. “Pat DeLeon is known internationally for her research on genetics and was recognized by the White House for her mentorship of graduate students and faculty. Joyce Hill Stoner has written the book on painting conservation and conducts extensive professional activities locally, regionally and nationally. A prolific scholar, Susan Strasser has collected numerous prizes and awards for her books on American consumer culture. All three professors exemplify the hallmarks of excellence in their teaching, research and service to the University and community."

Patricia DeLeon

Patricia DeLeon, a professor of biological sciences and member of the UD Board of Trustees, will be honored this fall by President Barak Obama in a special ceremony at the White House.

DeLeon will receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, which is presented each year to individuals or organizations in recognition of the crucial role that mentoring plays in the academic and personal development of students studying science or engineering and who belong to minorities that are underrepresented in those fields.

Research interests for DeLeon include the genetic and molecular mechanisms of spermatogenesis, epididymal function and the molecular aspects of fertilization.

DeLeon received her doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, in 1972 and did postdoctoral studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, until 1975. She has been a visiting scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and she was an adjunct professor at Penn State University College of Medicine.

DeLeon was the keynote speaker at the Inaugural Mentoring Symposium of the American Society of Andrology in 2006 and at the Mentoring Symposium of the Society for the Study of Reproduction in 2008. She has served as chairperson of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) and on the President's Commission on the Status of Women at UD.

A 1996 nominee for the Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Award, DeLeon now has three patents issued or pending, and her research has been supported by both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She has received many honors and awards, including the National Science Foundation Career Advancement Award and the Medical Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship.

A 1992 gubernatorial appointee to the UD Board of Trustees, DeLeon was re-appointed in 2005. She is a member of the board's Academic Affairs Committee.

Trustees Distinguished Professorships were created by the University's Board of Trustees to recognize deserving senior members of the faculty.

Joyce Hill Stoner

Joyce Hill Stoner, who became the head paintings conservator at Winterthur in 1976, also was director of the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) from 1982-97. She became chair in 1990 when WUDPAC became part of a department, along with the new doctoral program in Art Conservation Research, which she squired through University and Winterthur Academic Committee approval. Stoner currently is director of the UD Preservation Studies Doctoral Program.

The author of more than 60 articles or book chapters, Stoner recently was asked to edit a multi-author 600-page Butterworth-Heinemann book on The Conservation of Easel Paintings, to be published in 2011.

Stoner also was senior conservator for the team treating Whistler's Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 1992, and she supervised the treatment of a 19-foot by 60-foot N.C. Wyeth mural in 1998.

She also has carried out treatments for the Freer Gallery of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Brandywine River Museum, the Wyeth family and various private collectors. Stoner continues an active program of treating paintings in the presence of the undergraduate and graduate students she is supervising.

Her portrait has been painted by Andrew Wyeth. She guest curated the show FACTORY WORK: WARHOL, WYETH AND BASQUIAT and wrote for and coordinated authors for the catalogue. That show appeared in three venues in 2006-07.

She was a Kress Visiting Scholar with John Brealey at the Metropolitan Museum (1980), and a Getty Visiting Scholar with Andrea Rothe at the Getty Museum (1985). In 1995, Stoner completed a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware, focusing on the techniques of paintings, lithographs and decorated interiors by James McNeill Whistler. She began a pre-conservation program at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1975.

Stoner received her bachelor of arts degree from the College of William and Mary in 1968 (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with a major in fine arts and honors project in painting conservation). She received her master's degree from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1970 and her diploma in conservation from the NYU Conservation Center in 1973.

In her field, Stoner has served as executive director for the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation (FAIC) from 1975-79, coordinator of the FAIC oral history project (1975-present), managing editor of Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts (1969-85), and as a grant reviewer for the NMA, IMS, FAIC, Kress and Getty Grant Program. Stoner also served as vice president the College Art Association until 2005 and currently serves on the IIC Council (as vice president), the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts (AATA) Board of Editors for the Getty Conservation Institute, the U.S. Senate Art Advisory Committee and the Delaware State Arts Council. Stoner was awarded the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) University Products Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professorships are funded by the late Edward F. Rosenberg, AS '29, '30M, and his wife, Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg. Dr. Rosenberg was a nationally known rheumatologist, and his wife, a graduate of the Curtis Institute, was a concert pianist and harpist.

Susan Strasser

Susan Strasser, who teaches in the UD Department of History, also is a Senior Resident Scholar at the Hagley Museum and Library's Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society. She teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses on topics related to the histories of consumer culture, the environment and industrialization, concentrating on the United States since 1865.

A historian of American consumer culture, Strasser has been praised by The New Yorker for “retrieving what history discards: the taken-for-granted minutiae of everyday life.”

Books by Strasser include Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982), which won the Sierra Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians; Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989); and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999), winner of the Abel Wolman Award from the Public Works Historical Society. She has also edited Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market (2003) and coedited Getting and Spending: American and European Consumer Societies in the 20th Century, Cambridge University Press, (1998).

Strasser currently is working on A Historical Herbal: Healing with Plants in a Developing Consumer Culture. In chapters organized around individual plants, the book will describe the culture and commerce of medicinal herbs in 19th and 20th century America, reflecting on industrial-era relationships with plants.

Strasser, who earned a bachelor's degree in history at Reed College, received her master's and doctoral degrees in U.S. history from SUNY at Stony Brook. She has taught at The Evergreen State College, Princeton University, George Washington University and the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the German Historical Institute, the Harvard Business School, the American Council of Learned Societies, Radcliffe College 's Bunting Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the Cultures of Consumption Programme, Birkbeck College, University of London

The Richards Professorship memorializes Lydia H. Richards, Robert H. Richards Sr. and Robert H. Richards Jr. Lydia Richards served on the Women's College advisory committee to the Board of Trustees, Robert H. Richards Sr. was a leader of the Delaware bar and member of the UD Board of Trustees, and Robert H. Richards Jr., who graduated from UD in 1928, succeeded his father as head of the Wilmington law firm of Richards, Layton & Finger.