OCO Director Hailin Wang Receives Bray Faculty Endowment Award

Research Interests: Optical Properties of Semiconductor Nanostructures

Professor of Physics and Oregon Center for Optics Director, Hailin Wang has been awarded the Bray Scholarship prize by the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Dietrich Belitz, Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences announced the award on December 7th.

This award was is meant to recognize Dr. Wang’s research achievements and carries a special stipend.

Dr. Belitz was quoted as saying that Dr. Wang is “one of our very best and most successful faculty members, and that I look forward to continue interacting with [him] as a colleague and fellow researcher for many years.”

In January 1993, retired oil executive Richard Bray helped establish a faculty “fighting fund” aimed at retaining and attracting top-notch faculty. The gift immediately secured a matching grant from the Faculty Endowment Fund, endorsed by the 1991 Oregon state legislature.

The Richard A. Bray Faculty Endowment is under the control of the dean of arts and sciences. There are just three specifications for its use: Recipients will have demonstrated excellence in teaching as well as scholarship; they are willing to provide professional service to the academic field or the larger community; and each award will have a leveraging effect, academically or financially. “Right now, anything we can do to keep our top faculty happy enough to stay around,” Bray said at the time, “is to our advantage.”