An immunologist whose research could help boost the weakened immune systems of the elderly, an educator who has helped learning-disabled children become better at math, and a philosopher who pioneered a novel approach to virtue ethics have received one of the University of Miami’s highest honors for academic pursuits.

UM faculty members Bonnie Blomberg, Marjorie Montague, and Michael Slote are recipients of the 2009 Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity.

Blomberg, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Miller School of Medicine, and Slote, UST Professor of Ethics and professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences, accepted the award during a ceremony on the Coral Gables campus on March 31, each receiving a plaque and generous monetary prize to advance their work.

Top scholars: Recipients of the 2009 Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity were honored at a ceremony on March 31 on the Coral Gables campus. Attending the ceremony were, from left, David Birnbach, vice provost for faculty affairs who led the award selection process; Walter Secada, professor and chair of teaching and learning at the School of Education, who accepted the award on behalf of recipient Marjorie Montague, who could not attend; award winners Bonnie Blomberg and Michael Slote; and Provost Thomas J. LeBlanc.

Montague, a professor of teaching and learning in the School of Education, could not attend the ceremony because she was at a national meeting in Seattle. But her department chair, professor Walter Secada, accepted the award on her behalf.

“The defining characteristic of a modern research university and the source of its academic reputation is the scholarly production of its faculty,” Provost Thomas J. LeBlanc said. “Each of these individuals, chosen by a committee of previous award recipients, is an outstanding scholar and role model for their colleagues and students.”

Bonnie Blomberg

Blomberg was 9 years old when she checked out the book Microbe Hunters from her elementary school’s library.

“I was fascinated by it,” she says of the book, a text on the pioneering bacteriological work of such scientists as Leeuwenhoek, Koch, and Pasteur. “After reading it, I had this dream of what I wanted to be: a medical microbiologist—that’s what I wrote in my high school yearbook.”

At the Miller School, Blomberg’s research lab focuses on B lymphocytes, also called B cells, which play an important role in the body’s immune system, producing antibodies that attack foreign substances and help fight infections. But as people age, their immune system weaken.

Blomberg is searching for the molecular and cellular basis for this decline in the humoral immune response, experimenting on mice and gaining knowledge that has already been transferred to her research with humans.

“The next step is how to fix it,” said Blomberg, who studied under legendary immunologist Melvin Cohn at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, as well as Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa at MIT. “But we’re not completely there yet.”

She is getting closer, though. In a collaboration that is to begin soon with the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Blomberg and her research team will measure patients’ immune response to the flu vaccine and then correlate those findings with measurements of B cell function. The National Institute on Aging grant that will help fund this study is one of several NIH awards she has received over the years. She also has received an NIH Merit Award to conduct the murine aspects of her research.

“An imminent scientist and one of the most productive researchers I’ve ever known” is how Eckhard Podack, Blomberg’s department chair, describes her.

Her research into why the body’s immune system weakens with age could help lead to the development of better vaccines to help the elderly fight infections and the debilitating effects of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Marjorie Montague

“A leader in the field of learning disabilities” is how Dean Isaac Prilleltensky describes Montague.

A former classroom teacher in Arizona and New York, Montague is currently conducting a $2.1 million U.S. Department of Education-funded study aimed at improving mathematical reasoning in children with learning disabilities.

As part of the study, which is being implemented at 40 Miami-Dade County public schools, she is testing the effectiveness of an intervention she developed called Solve It!, which teaches students how to understand, analyze, solve, and evaluate mathematical problems by developing strategies used by effective problem solvers. Eventually, she hopes to test her theory in school districts throughout the state.

In another study, she tracked more than 200 children who were either at risk or not at risk of developing serious emotional and behavioral disorders when they were in early primary school, producing data that were used by several of her doctoral students to complete their dissertations.

While on sabbatical 15 years ago, she worked for the Ministry of Education in Portugal as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and since joining the School of Education in 1987, Montague has secured more than $10 million in federal research funding.

Michael Slote

Harvard educated and an author of 11 books, Slote is known for his groundbreaking work on moral sentimentalism.

In The Ethics of Care and Empathy, Slote’s most recently published work, he further advances a sentimentalist theory initiated in his earlier books and papers, showing the basis of morality in human feeling rather than reason or rationality.

“There’s been a lot of talk about empathy in American society and culture,” Slote said, noting that while psychologists and evolutionary biologists have studied extensively in this area, philosophers have not delved nearly as much into the theory.

“What I’ve tried to do is show why empathy is terribly important to moral philosophy,” Slote continued. “In addition and more general, if empathy’s important to moral philosophy, then the rationalists who say that morality is just a matter of pure reason are missing out on something important to morality, mainly the emotional content.”

In his soon-to-be-published book, Moral Sentimentalism, he writes about this point, arguing that rationalists have missed out on the emotional, empathic side of morality. The text will be part of an Oxford University Press three-book series, which Department of Philosophy Chair Harvey Siegel says “will deepen [Slote’s] contributions to moral theory and further cement his international reputation. Their publication will be a major event for ethicists the world over.”