The University of Nevada, Reno Foundation sponsors numerous faculty awards with the support of unrestricted gifts and in 2023, these recognitions totaled more than $78,000.
Each year since 1983, three tenured professors who have demonstrated excellence as teachers and scholars are named Foundation Professors — an honorific title carried in perpetuity — and awarded $15,000 from the University Foundation to support their professional endeavors.
In 1996, Marta Elliott responded to a job posting for an assistant professor in sociology and social psychology, beginning her nearly 30-year career as a respected teacher, researcher and mentor at the University and now, chair of the Department of Sociology.
“As chair, I love that I’m able to participate in hiring and mentoring junior faculty,” Elliott said. “I love taking care of an entire department that means so much to me.”
In her undergraduate and graduate methods and statistics courses, Elliott teaches students to translate something they’re interested in into a researchable question they can collect data and test a hypothesis on. “They learn how to talk about what they care most deeply about with the authority of empirical evidence to back them up.”
Elliott also teaches courses connected to her research on the social determinants of health. Since many students come in with a narrow understanding of health, these courses expand their view to include how social conditions, rather than just biological or psychological ones, affect health.
Working side-by-side with her students, Elliott conducts qualitative research on peoples’ experiences in mental health care — from receiving their diagnosis to treatment and ultimately, living with their condition. By bringing their stories to light, Elliott identifies issues in the mental health care system which creates opportunities for change. She also created the Marta Elliott Scholarship Endowment Fund to support students who are balancing their studies with mental health challenges.
The Foundation Professor award funding will enable Elliott to pay her research participants for sharing their stories, employ the graduate students who are integral to her research, and allow Elliott to travel and share her findings around the globe.
“I’ve spent my entire career here, this is my academic home, and while I have given a lot to the University, the University has given a lot back to me.”
Having her name engraved in Honor Court serves as a meaningful reminder for Elliott of this incredible recognition — one she will be able to see every time she takes a walk to south campus.
After completing his doctorate in mathematics, Christopher Herald held positions all over the U.S., Canada and Germany. Originally from Northern California, he was delighted to settle near the Sierras with a tenure-track position in the Department of Mathematics at the University. Since Herald started in 1999, the program has expanded into the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and Herald helped bring the doctoral program to fruition. He enjoys being able to teach advanced courses to graduate students in his area of research — low-dimensional topology and three-dimensional manifolds — which studies geometric shapes such as knots and surfaces.
“It’s very exciting to be able to share the advanced ideas I’m really passionate about with students who are far enough along to understand it,” said Herald.
Recently, Herald had a foray into the art world when Austin Pratt ’15 (art), curator of the Sheppard Contemporary Gallery in the Church Fine Arts building, reached out to learn about topology. Pratt wanted to leverage Herald’s expertise to inform a group art exhibition called “Toward a Tangled Turn: Knots, Nets, Threads & Loops.”
When Pratt learned Herald had been carving knots and other complex mathematical shapes out of wood, he wanted to include the carvings in the exhibit. Herald never considered himself an artist and admits he only started the carvings because they interested him and he wanted beautiful, tangible representations of the shapes he was puzzling over in his head — which can be quite hard to conceptualize, even for a mathematician. Herald also took part in a panel discussion with visiting artist Julian Hoeber.
Mathematics research doesn’t require expensive laboratory equipment. “Our research gets done with us staring at a piece of paper, trying to figure out a way to understand something,” Herald said. However, what is needed for his research is interacting and collaborating with other mathematicians. The award funding will facilitate these vital interactions with other researchers, and allow Herald to travel to conferences and bring speakers to the University.
Herald is humbled to have his name in Honor Court alongside other successful University researchers. “We’re often busy, hunkered down, working away in our research specialty, hoping that we’re having an impact. Being recognized by colleagues across the University means an incredible amount.”
When Dr. Violeta Mutafova-Yambolieva’s unorthodox career journey brought her to the University, she never imagined her twoyear postdoctoral fellowship would turn into a more than 30-year career as a professor of physiology and cell biology. Now, her name is engraved in Honor Court, forever recognizing her research and dedication to the University.
“I consider this award as the most prominent recognition of my work at this stage in my career,” Mutafova-Yambolieva said. “Since I’ve been at the University for three decades, it also feels like a lifetime achievement award.”
After completing her medical degree at the Sofia Medical Academy in Bulgaria,
Mutafova-Yambolieva practiced medicine. Later, her focus shifted from medicine to research and she earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology and physiology.
In 1993, Mutafova-Yambolieva was awarded a fellowship from the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health that required her to find a laboratory in the U.S. with the expertise to support her research. She chose 1987 Foundation Professor David Westfall’s laboratory. “Dr. Westfall was department chair but he also had a very active research group and they were world-renowned in the field of adrenergic-purinergic cotransmission. This matched my goals perfectly.”
The ambition of Mutafova-Yambolieva’s research in extracellular purinergic signaling is to develop methods for preventing and treating conditions such as hypertension, gastrointestinal motility disorders and diseases of the lower urinary tract, diseases she says “tremendously affect the quality of life of both patients and caregivers.”
Running an active research laboratory on top of teaching physiology, pathophysiology and neuroscience to medical and graduate students can be demanding, but Mutafova-Yambolieva finds it “extremely rewarding because it requires me to be a lifelong learner.”
Mutafova-Yambolieva will use the Foundation Professor funding to send postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to international meetings in their research fields, which she feels are vital for gaining exposure to the rigorous standards of high-level science and networking.