Attracted by state-of-the-art facilities and a plan to increase investment in academic centers of excellence, a number of distinguished researchers and scholars joined the UConn faculty this year. Among a stellar class of faculty recruits are endowed chair holders: Robert Birge, Richard Mains, and Donald Leu.

Dr. Robert Birge, holder of the Harold S. Schwenk Distinguished Chair in Chemistry, is one of the world's most original scientific thinkers. Birge is pioneering research that uses a 3.5 billion-year-old bacterium to store information. In fact, Birge and his colleagues have already adapted one of the organism's proteins, turning it into a storehouse of electronic data.

"We are essentially using nature to provide a mechanism for data storage," he explains. And nature appears to be doing a terrific job.

A small vial of gel containing the protein can store twice as much textual information as the Library of Congress contains.

A primary reason Birge came to UConn was the new chemistry building which he calls "the finest facility for chemistry research in the nation." The offer of an endowed chair was further incentive: "The endowed chair provides me with resources to do the kinds of experiments I would not be able to do otherwise--very high-risk projects, with tremendous potential for significant scientific advancements."

While Birge is leading the way in chemistry and biotechnology, Dr. Richard Mains is exploring the secrets of the human nervous system. As the William Beecher Scoville, M.D. Chair in Neurosciences at the UConn Health Center, Mains focuses his scientific attention on peptides--chemicals which neurons use to "talk" to one another.

Mains is joined at UConn by Dr. Elizabeth Eipper, a peptides expert who collaborated with him previously at Johns Hopkins University. Research advances made by Mains and Eipper could eventually lead to treatments for spinal cord injuries and debilitating nervous system diseases.

In the field of education, Dr. Donald Leu, one of the nation's prominent specialists in reading and Internet technology, was named to the John and Maria Neag Chair in Literacy and Technology.

Leu believes "the Internet is fundamentally redefining what it means to become literate" and wants to make teachers more proficient in using it to build literacy skills. Leu is the author of the first multimedia software series to integrate children's literature with digitized speech and animation.

These newly appointed chair holders represent the outstanding faculty the University has recruited this year--teachers, researchers and visionaries who are at the forefront of knowledge and innovation in a multitude of academic disciplines.