The University’s annual Faculty Achievement Awards seek to build bridges between the Hilltop and Medical campuses. This year, Michael W. Sherraden of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and Emil R. Unanue of the School of Medicine are the recipients of these prestigious awards, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced.
Sherraden, Ph.D., the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development, will receive the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award.
Unanue, M.D., the Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology and Immunology and chair of that department, will receive the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award.
“I am pleased that our faculty members have once again made wise and deserving selections for the winners of this year’s Faculty Achievement Awards,” Wrighton said. “Professors Sherraden and Unanue are widely respected by both their peers and their colleagues at other universities, and they have made enormous and lasting contributions in their areas of scholarly activity.
“Their work and their reputations bring great visibility and impact to the University, and I am delighted to see them receive the highest level of recognition from their peers.”
Sherraden and Unanue will receive their awards and give presentations of their work during a Dec. 2 ceremony at the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center.
The selection committee for the faculty achievement awards included three members from both Arts & Sciences and the medical school and one member from each of the University’s other schools.
Criteria for selection include:
• Outstanding achievement in research and scholarship;
• Recognized prominence within the community of scholars;
• Service and dedication to the betterment of the University; and
• Respected accomplishment in teaching.
The awards include a $5,000 honorarium.
Sherraden, founder and director of the School of Social Work’s Center for Social Development (CSD), is known for his pioneering work on asset building for low-income people.
In his 1991 book, Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy, Sherraden proposed establishing individual savings accounts for the poor — also known as Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). His program calls for the government and private sector to match individual contributions to IDAs as a means of encouraging savings and breaking the cycle of poverty.
IDAs have been adopted in federal legislation and in more than 40 states.
Research results from the American Dream Demonstration, a large, eight-year CSD research project to test IDAs, were instrumental in the design of Universal Savings Accounts, a 1999 proposal by President Clinton that would enable all working people to have a 401(k) retirement plan.
Sherraden’s work on assets has influenced policy development in the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Canada, Indonesia and other countries. In the United Kingdom, as of 2005, all newborns are given an account at birth, with a larger initial deposit into the accounts of children in low-income families.
CSD is now testing universal children’s savings accounts in a project known as Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment (SEED).
In addition to his asset-building research, Sherraden’s scholarship also focuses on civic service and productive aging.
Unanue came to WUSTL in 1985 and is pathologist-in-chief of Barnes-Jewish Hospital. During his tenure, the University’s immunology program has become one of the major centers in the world for immunological research.
Unanue is internationally recognized as a leader in understanding how the immune system identifies foreign material — known as an antigen — and how immune system T cells respond to it.
In the early 1980s, his research group uncovered a critical component of how T cells recognize invaders.
Scientists had previously speculated that the cells were recognizing the shapes of intact pathogens, but Unanue showed that they were identifying parts of pathogens during their interactions with another group of immune cells, the antigen-presenting cells. These cells pick up antigens and degrade them to fragments, or peptides.
Unanue and Paul Allen, Ph.D., the Robert L. Kroc Professor of Pathology and Immunology, discovered that antigen-presenting cells bind these peptides to a special group of molecules known as the major histocompatibility complex.
Through his continuing investigations into how immune recognition and attacks take place, Unanue has helped scientists gain important insights that may one day be harnessed to improve the body’s defenses against diseases and to disarm misdirected immune attacks that could lead to autoimmune conditions such as diabetes and arthritis.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.