Four top scholars named recipients of University Scholarly Achievement Award

Colleagues,

It is my honor today to announce four midcareer faculty members as recipients of the annual University Scholarly Achievement Award. This annual award recognizes significant research or scholarly achievement across the Lawrence and KU Medical Center campuses and is typically presented in each of four categories.

This year’s recipients are as follows:

Katie Batza
Associate Professor
Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
(Arts & Humanities category)

Anthony Fehr
Associate Professor
Department of Molecular Biosciences
(Science, Technology and Mathematics category)

Bret Freudenthal
Professor
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
(Medicine and Clinical Science category)

David Slusky 
Professor
Departments of Economics and of Speech-Language Hearing
(Social Sciences and Professional Programs category)

I want to congratulate Professor Batza, Professor Fehr, Professor Freudenthal and Professor Slusky on being recipients of our University Scholarly Achievement Award. These scholars have helped elevate our university through their work, and their achievements demonstrate how KU benefits society as one of the nation’s leading research universities.

I invite you to learn more about these outstanding researchers by reading the brief profiles provided below.

I also want to remind you that these four University Scholarly Achievement Award winners — along with the winners of the university’s other top annual research awards — will be honored April 14 at the University Research Awards ceremony at the Jayhawk Welcome Center. All faculty and staff are invited to attend. We ask that you RSVP in advance to assist with our planning.

Again, congratulations to this year's winners. Please join me in congratulating and thanking them for their efforts to advance our research mission.

Respectfully,

Doug

Douglas A. Girod
Chancellor

Honoree Profiles

Katie Batza

Professor Batza’s research examines health, politics, and sexuality in the late 20^th century United States. Her innovative research challenges prevailing narratives of LGBTQ health activism and recasts traditional thinking about the medical and political responses to the early AIDS crisis of the 1970s through the 1990s. Professor Batza has published multiple articles and two books. Her first book, Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s, explores gay health activism in the period before the AIDS epidemic changed the global LGBTQ health landscape. Professor Batza’s second book, AIDS in the Heartland, examines the unfolding health crisis and local response to the AIDS epidemic in the Midwest, methodically documenting the transformative political activism that emerged from communities dealing with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. This book makes a significant research contribution to the fields of history, health, politics, and gender studies. Learn more about Professor Batza.

Anthony Fehr

Professor Fehr’s research is at the forefront of understanding how coronaviruses cause disease in humans, where he focuses his efforts on the interplay between the host immune response and how coronaviruses overcome this response. In particular, his research focuses on how our bodies respond to viral infections through cellular modifications. These modifications in response to viral infections prime the immune response to block viruses from spreading within the body. Fehr’s work was the first to establish a connection between a cellular modification referred to as ADP-ribosylation and protection from viral infection. This modification targets host proteins to activate them into better countering viral replication in host cells, which limits the ability of the virus to multiply in host cells. The virus has developed its own counterpunch to these cellular modifications through a protein called Mac1, that removes the cellular modification, thus dampening the immune response, allowing the virus to replicate unchecked where it eventually causes tissue damage and disease. By understanding this interplay, Fehr’s research team has developed novel inhibitors that block the activity of the Mac1 viral protein to restore the immune response to clear the infection. His research has also developed important tools to genetically alter the virus. One such alteration involves removing the virus’s ability to make the Mac1 protein, and this modified virus is unable to cause disease, highlighting its potential use as an attenuated vaccine.  This novel vaccine should result in lasting immunity to the virus and require far fewer vaccine booster shots. Learn more about Professor Fehr.

Bret Freudenthal

Professor Freudenthal is an internationally recognized leader in the field of DNA repair whose work has significantly advanced our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and health. In doing this work, he has been a force in the university’s effort to land and sustain the NCI-designated KU Cancer Center. Freudenthal’s research has probed the structural and biochemical features of one critical DNA repair mechanism: base excision repair. This repair pathway is particularly important because it fixes the most common types of DNA damage. In his post-doctoral work, Freudenthal established how one of the protein machines (“enzyme”) in base excision repair inserts a correction into the DNA molecule. This work involved visualizing the enzyme and DNA molecules at the atomic level, using a complex implementation of time-lapse X-ray crystallography. This allowed him to describe each of the chemical steps that occur during DNA synthesis, revealing how this enzyme ensures that DNA is accurately copied during DNA repair. This work resulted in an extensive list of publications, including several in the very top journals in biomedical science. Learn more about Professor Freudenthal.

David Slusky

Professor Slusky is a health economist whose innovative research has advanced our understanding of 1) the socioeconomic consequences of access to reproductive health care and 2) the health impacts of the Flint water crisis. With regard to reproductive health, his work  has grown in relevance and impact since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe vs. Wade. States like Texas and Wisconsin denied state Medicaid funds to family planning clinics that performed abortions, including their affiliates that did not provide abortions, resulting in the closure of many family planning clinics. Slusky’s innovation was to examine the effect of defunding family planning clinics on health outcomes within a radius of a woman’s home. In related work, Slusky has shown that when hospital ownership changes to a Catholic affiliation, it reduces reproductive care such as tubal ligations. Meanwhile, his work on the Flint water crisis finds that the crisis resulted in a decrease in the fertility rate and a decrease in birthweight. He also shows that lead tests happened earlier in children’s lives in Flint in response to the water crisis but resulted in no overall increase in testing rates. Learn more about Professor Slusky.