Two From UA Appointed Regents' Professors
Entomologist Bruce Tabashnik and history professor Julia Clancy-Smith bring the University's total number of Regents' Professors to 99. In addition, Vicente Talanquer, Henrietta "Etta" Kralovec and Frans Tax have been named Distinguished Professors.

University Relations — Communications
June 17, 2015

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Bruce Tabashnik
Bruce Tabashnik


Two University of Arizona professors have received the highest honor bestowed on faculty in the Arizona state university system.

The appointment of Bruce Tabashnik and Julia Clancy-Smith as Regents’ Professors, approved recently by the Arizona Board of Regents, brings to 99 the UA’s number of Regents' Professors since the designation was created in 1987. The honor is reserved for faculty scholars who have achieved national and international distinction for their work.

In addition, Vicente Talanquer has been named as a University Distinguished Professor for his contributions to educational excellence and undergraduate education. Henrietta "Etta" Kralovec and Frans Tax have been named as University Distinguished Outreach Faculty for their sustained commitment to community and academic outreach.

Formal ceremonies for the five will take place in the fall.

Regents’ Professors

Bruce Tabashnik

Tabashnik, professor and head of entomology in the UA’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has served as head of the Department of Entomology since 1996 and is a member of the BIO5 Institute. He previously was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii and earned his doctorate at Stanford University.

He has spent decades conducting pioneering research on strategies to delay insect resistance to proteins produced by the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that kill some key insect pests but are not toxic to most other organisms, including humans and even most beneficial insects.

Tabashnik has served as an editorial board member for six scientific journals and provided more than 700 reviews of grant proposals and manuscripts for eight granting agencies and 82 journals. His funded extramural research grants total more than $9 million, and he has co-authored a patent licensed to a major corporation. 

Tabashnik was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010 and a fellow of the Entomological Society of America in 2007, which also honored him with the Excellence in Integrated Pest Management Award in 1992.

Julia Clancy-Smith

Clancy-Smith, an award-winning history professor, teaches about modern and early modern Africa and the Middle East.

She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the National Humanities Center's Research Fellowship in North Carolina; a fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University's School of Social Science; and a research fellowship with the Woodrow Wilson Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Clancy-Smith has authored and co-authored several award-winning books, including "The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents," "Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900" and "Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904)."

"Mediterraneans" won the 2011 French Colonial Historical Society Book Award and the 2011 Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society Award.  Clancy-Smith also has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and reviews for books and films.

University Distinguished Professor

Vicente Talanquer

Talanquer’s research centers on the improvement of chemistry education and science teacher preparation.

Talanquer is co-principal investigator on the UA's grant for the STEM Undergraduate Education Initiative. In 2013, the UA was selected by the Association of American Universities as one of eight project sites funded by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to usher in drastic improvements to instruction and learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM fields.

Talanquer, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and 10 textbooks, four of which are used by science students throughout Mexico.

For his work, he has earned several awards and prizes, including the 2012 James Flack Norris Award for the Outstanding Teaching of Chemistry from the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society; the UA's Five Star Teaching Award in 2006; and the UA College of Science's Early Career Teaching Award in 2004.

University Distinguished Outreach Faculty

Henrietta "Etta" Kralovec

Kralovec is an associate professor of teacher education and director of the secondary education program at UA South.

In 2011, she received a $2.2 million Department of Education grant for the UA's Transition to Teaching program, which prepares STEM teachers for Title I schools in Arizona's Cochise and Santa Cruz counties. The teaching initiative is designed to encourage interested professionals to consider a teaching career. The program this year won a Peter W. Likins Inclusive Excellence Award.

Kralovec, author and co-author of three books, has received numerous awards and honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship in 1996 to establish a teacher education program at Africa University in Zimbabwe. In 2014, she received a faculty travel grant from University South Foundation to support her travel to Finland, where she worked with educators to identify best practices to aid in students' academic success.

Kralovec's research interests include innovation within alternative teacher certification programs for schools along the U.S.-Mexican border and the impact of military service on learning to teach.

Frans Tax

Tax is a professor of molecular and cellular biology in the UA College of Science and a member of the BIO5 Institute. His research areas include cell and developmental biology, genetics and epigenetics, and genomics, bioinformatics and systems biology. 

Tax's research is focused on plant development, especially stem cells and their differentiation into specialized cells, as well as the application of developmental genetics to crop plants. To understand signaling events that take place in development, he analyzes the phenotypes of plants mutant for individual or multiple receptors. His lab has identified key roles for specific receptors during radial patterning in early embryogenesis, during the formation of lateral roots, in the formation of fruit organs from stem cells within the fruit, in the development of vascular tissues and in the process of cell elongation. In addition, Tax is interested in developing approaches to isolate mutants in these receptors to manipulate the architecture and physiological responses of crop plants.

Tax is the co-editor of "Receptor-like Kinases in Plants: From Development to Defense," published in 2012. He has a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of North Carolina and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Washington.

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