Advanced Search

• Home Page
• All Stories
• Top Stories
• People
• Voices
• Around Campus
• Faculty Bulletin Board
• Archives

UCLA Today → All Stories

Print this Page Mail this Page

Senate vice chair wins Gold Shield Faculty Prize

Faculty members who attended the Academic Senate’s Legislative Assembly meeting on June 11 weren’t surprised to see Robin Garrell, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, sitting at the front of the room next to the Senate’s current chair, Michael Goldstein. A familiar face to senate members, Garrell has served as vice chair/chair-elect in 2008-2009 and will take over as chair on Sept. 1.

But what most of the people in the Charles E. Young Grand Salon didn’t know was that Garrell was about to receive the 2009 Gold Shield Faculty Prize, a $30,000 award sponsored by Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA. The Gold Shield prize is given annually to a mid-career faculty member who has demonstrated extraordinary quality in teaching and in research or creative activity, together with a significant level of public service within the university.

Garrell’s peers applauded enthusiastically as she accepted the Gold Shield Faculty Prize plaque from Chancellor Gene Block, who gave a brief account of her impressive research in polymer chemistry, her active role in the chemistry community and her ability to inspire and encourage students. Block drew chuckles when he told the audience, “Perhaps the highest compliment came from a course evaluation, when a student wrote that Robin’s class ‘was worth waking up at 6:30 a.m. for.’ ”

Garrell’s colleagues in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department — Michael Jung and Ric Kaner — called her “the complete package” in their nomination letter. “She is a creative and accomplished scientist, an innovative and lauded educator, and an effective and dedicated leader,” they wrote. “She embodies the tripartite mission of UCLA: excellence in research, education and service. We can think of no one more deserving of the singular honor the Gold Shield Faculty Prize represents.”

The prize winner herself is a gentle, soft-spoken soul who is known for doing some pretty innovative things in the classroom. For example, students entering Garrell’s general chemistry class on the first day might encounter a dark room with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” blaring and balloons bursting. When the lights come up, there is the petite professor standing on a bench, welcoming the students to class.

Garrell has found that it helps to be visual, so she uses Silly Putty and huge, foam-rubber models of atoms and molecules to deftly illustrate the concept of chemical bonds. To explain the idea of thermodynamics, she asks her students to think about something familiar, like pizza.

“Have you ever wondered why, when you eat a bite of pizza straight from the oven, the cheese burns the roof of your mouth, yet the crust doesn’t burn your tongue? You could put a thermometer into the cheese and crust, and they’re the same temperature,” she said. “That’s because it’s all about heat capacity. Cheese has a higher heat capacity than bread.”

Using familiar concepts makes thermodynamics a little less painful, Garrell said. “I try to make things relevant. That’s a big part of what I do.”

As a youngster growing up in Michigan and Connecticut, Garrell enjoyed studying chemistry, biology and physics, and figured that one day she would become an executive at a big plastics company. But while a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, she was mentored for a faculty position in analytical chemistry.

“I applied for both industry and academic jobs, and I got offers in both,” she said. “I decided it would be easier — if things didn’t work out in academics — to go into industry. So I took the riskier road and became an assistant professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh.”

That was in 1984. In 1991, Garrell was recruited to come to UCLA, which had one huge thing in its favor: Kendall Houk, UCLA’s Saul Winstein Chair in Organic Chemistry, who also happens to be Garrell’s husband. For six years, Houk and Garrell had maintained a long-distance relationship — he in Los Angeles and she in Pittsburgh — so Garrell was more than happy to accept the UCLA position.

Today, Garrell directs a number of wide-ranging research projects. One of her projects involves finding faster, cheaper ways to develop tiny, hollow polymer shells made out of resorcinol-formaldehyde to be used in nuclear fusion technology. Her work has also provided the basis for building a new “lab on a chip” platform, in which liquids are moved as droplets between two plates, enabling high-throughput sample preparations in micro- and nanoscale analysis.

Garrell also directs two training programs funded by the National Science Foundation — one for graduate students called the Materials Creation Training Program (MCTP), and one for undergraduates called NanoCER (Nanosystems Chemistry and Engineering Research).

The Gold Shield Faculty Prize comes at a great time for Garrell, who is considering using it to support student travel to conferences. “I had a student this past year who was working on a project that was difficult to get external funding for. She’s doing art conservation chemistry, and there’s not a lot of federal or state money to fund that kind of work,” she said.

Her student had submitted her research to a conference in India and had gotten accepted, but Garrell didn’t have the money to send her there. But now — thanks to the Gold Shield prize — she does. “It’s a wonderful prize because it doesn’t have any restrictions on it,” she said.

When reminded that she will be taking over as chair of the Academic Senate during a challenging economic time, Garrell laughed.

“Many people have complimented me on my sense of timing,” she said. “Impeccable, I think is the word they used. But almost every person has followed up with a very quick rejoinder, saying, ‘Anything I can do to help.’ Many have said that they will step up to the plate over the academic year to help us make some of these decisions. And I’m going to hold them to that!”