January 21, 2011

Contact:   Bill Giduz

Ramirez (red coat) with his laboratory colleagues last summer: (Seated l-r) Matt De Niear '11, Charlie Ford '12, Mercedes Robinson '09. (Back l-r) Ramirez, Mary Biggs from Fayetteville State Univ., Lindsey Shapiro from Appalachian State Univ., Puneet Lakhmani '11, Malcolm Moses-Hampton '12.

Julio J. Ramirez, the R. Stuart Dickson Professor of Psychology at Davidson College, has been named by President Barack Obama as a recipient of a the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

Ramirez will receive the award next Thursday, Jan. 27, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, will make the presentation. Ramirez will deliver a ten-minute talk on that occasion about his thirty years of involving students in his research on recovery from brain injury and his national efforts to promote neuroscience education and research.

The awards annually recognize the teachers and institutions who have provided broad opportunities for participation by women, minorities and people with disabilities in science, mathematics and engineering in elementary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate education.

Ramirez, who joined the Davidson faculty in 1986, has been widely honored over the years for promoting a pedagogy of "terching"- teaching students by involving them in meaningful research projects. He has mentored more than 100 of them as research colleagues in investigating recovery of memory function through neuronal sprouting following brain injury. That research might yield insight into means of helping humans avoid, or recover, from Alzheimer's disease.

His work has resulted in dozens of articles in scientific journals, many of which were coauthored by his students. His efforts have been supported by major grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The latest award was in early January, when he received a grant of $460,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Prof. Julio Ramirez

His mentoring efforts were recognized as early in his career as 1989, when he was named North Carolina Professor of the Year and National Gold Medal Professor by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

In 1991 Ramirez co-founded the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN), an international organization committed to promoting and enhancing neuroscience education for undergraduate students. He was its founding president for three years. Ramirez co-founded (along with Dr. Barbara Lom of the Biology Department, who served as the journal's editor-in-chief) and became senior editor of its flagship publication, Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education.

He facilitated a partnership between FUN and the NSF-supported science advocacy organization, Project Kaleidoscope, that enabled him to organize with his colleagues national conferences in 1995, 1998, 2001, and 2005. Those gatherings yielded a set of guidelines for curricula in the neurosciences, providing faculty with the tools to launch neuroscience programs at their own institutions, and to create hands-on laboratory experiences for their students. FUN presented him with its highest honor, the Career Achievement Award, in 2001.

Ramirez was a founding member of the psychology division of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), and that organization named him as one of two inaugural CUR Fellows in 2000.

In 2004 the NSF named him as one of eight recipients of its top teaching and research honor, the Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars. He used the $305,000 grant from the NSF to establish a national mentoring program (SOMAS), which is now supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute focusing on underrepresented groups in the neurosciences (SOMAS-URM).

He has also been named as a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), of the American Psychological Association (APA), and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The designation at all three of these organizations recognizes outstanding and sustained contributions to the science of psychology and neuroscience through research, teaching, and service.

He served in fall 2009 as one of 120 participants invited by the APA to participate in a leadership conference about the future of scholarship dissemination. In addition, he served the APS by co-organizing its Festschrift for noted psychologist Donald Stein.

At Davidson, he founded the college's neuroscience program, and spearheaded its establishment as an academic concentration, emphasizing discovery-based learning from introductory courses through advanced study and theses. The college recognized his contributions to academic life in 1998 by naming him as its first R. Stuart Dickson Professor.

The NSF, an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education programs across all fields of science and engineering, administers the Presidential Mentoring Awards on behalf of the White House. Candidates are nominated for the honor by their institutions. In addition to being honored at the White House, recipients receive awards of $10,000 to advance their mentoring efforts.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.

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