Washington University scientists and recipients of this year?s Faculty Achievement Awards to give presentations for the Assembly Series

Sept. 15, 2004 -- Philip Stahl, prominent cell biologist and physiologist and Jonathan Turner, internationally recognized for his accomplishments in computer networks and telecommunications, will receive Washington University's 2004 Faculty Achievement Awards and summarize their scholarly work at an awards ceremony, as part of the Assembly Series.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Thurs., Sept. 23, in Room 100 of Whitaker Hall, located at the northeast corner of the Washington University Hilltop campus.

Philip D. Stahl, Ph.D., the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor and chair of the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology in the School of Medicine, will receive the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award. Jonathan S. Turner, Ph.D., the Henry Edwin Sever Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is being given the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award.

Stahl and Turner were selected by members of the faculty, based on the following criteria: outstanding achievement in research and scholarship; recognized prominence within the community of scholars; service and dedication to the betterment of the university; and commitment to teaching.

Stahl combines his numerous scientific accomplishments with an untiring devotion to education and mentorship. He was the first man to receive the Women in Cell Biology Senior Career Recognition Award from the American Society for Cell Biology for his work on recruiting and mentoring women.

Stahl has also been an avid supporter of the educational mission of the University. He was instrumental in the conception of the new Farrell Learning and Teaching Center, which will foster formal and informal interactions among students as well as provide state-of-the-art teaching and seminar facilities.

Stahl is recognized for his investigations into the mechanisms involved in endocytosis, the process through which cells absorb external substances such as proteins. He is studying endocytosis and signal transduction in cancerous cells in an effort to understand how growth signals are internalized into cells.

Stahl is also investigating the ways in which pathogens and cellular debris are transported to sites inside cells where they can be broken down and destroyed.

Turner's early work on high-performance packet-switching systems and networks played a central role in the development of Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology, a flexible, reliable and efficient communications technology that was developed to enable voice, data and video applications to co-exist in a common, high quality communications infrastructure.

With colleagues Jerome R. Cox Jr. and Guru Parulkar, Turner has led a series of major research projects that has contributed to the development of high-performance network technology and multimedia applications.

In 1997, the three also founded Growth Networks, a successful startup company, which developed electronic components for Internet routers with aggregate capacities of more than 10 trillion bits per second. In 2000, the company was acquired by Cisco Systems, which is expected to soon complete new high-performance systems based largely on the ideas and technologies developed at Growth Networks.

Turner's recent work centers on methods for improving the performance of Internet routers and making them more flexible by enabling them to host network plug-ins that serve as network-resident assists for end-to-end applications.

He has authored many widely cited publications and holds more than 20 patents for his work in high-performance communication systems.

For more information, call (314) 935-4620 or visit the Assembly Series Web page (http://assemblyseries.wustl.edu).