A maximum of 12 faculty members at the university may hold the ranking of University Distinguished Professor, which is a permanent designation. To obtain the rank, faculty members are nominated through an extensive review process and must be approved by the current University Distinguished Professors. The final approval comes when President Yates seeks endorsement from the university's governing board. Barry Beaty, Department of Microbiology Barry Beaty, professor of virology in the Department of Microbiology, is a leading researcher at Colorado State's Arthropod-borne Infectious Disease Laboratory. His team has been actively involved in researching the diagnosis, prevention and control of diseases like yellow fever, malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus and mosquito-borne encephalitis.
Mosquitoes are the most important vector of human parasitic disease.
Beaty and his team have been studying ways of genetically altering mosquitoes to make them viral-resistant and, therefore, unable to carry these diseases. Beaty, who is the former director of the Infectious Diseases Program, has been a program leader with the MacArthur Foundation Network on the Biology of Parasite Vectors since 1990. As a researcher, teacher, adviser and consultant in occupational therapy, Anne Fisher has achieved national and international prominence and has distinguished herself as a scholar in the field. Fisher, the first woman named as a University Distinguished Professor, developed the Occupational Therapy Intervention Process Model in response to international needs for effectively measuring rehabilitation efforts. Trained in traditional philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and at Columbia University, in the mid-1970s Rollin began to examine questions of animal experimentation, animal pain and consciousness and the moral status of the animal in society.