A geotechnical engineer who has made countless bridges, hospitals, dams and other structures safer in earthquakes and a professor who is changing the way millions of young people learn mathematics received 1999 Distinguished Public Service Awards this week from their colleagues at UC Davis. I.M. Idriss, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Tom Sallee, professor of mathematics, were honored by the Representative Assembly of the Academic Senate, the governing body of UC Davis professors. The annual awards include a shared $1,000 honorarium. They were established in 1990 to recognize faculty members who have made distinguished public-service contributions to the community, state, nation and world throughout their professional careers. Idriss studies soil stability Idriss has spent 40 years striving to characterize how soils react to the ground shaking that occurs in an earthquake. His geo-technical advice is sought after by government agencies and advisory panels around the world. Being a leader in earthquake safety and design policy takes "great wisdom and great skill," wrote Idriss' departmental colleagues in nominating him for the Distinguished Public Service Award. "The position demands ... a delicate balance of aggressiveness and diplomacy ... creativity and practicality ... authoritative technical depth ... and the highest sense of fairness and ethics. Professor Idriss executes his leadership role with impressive scholarship, grace, selfless dedication and vision." Idriss' most important public-service role came in 1989, when he was one of eight people named to the Governor's Board of Inquiry after the destructive 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay areas. That panel eventually recommended that all the state's approximately 24,000 bridges be inspected for quake-worthiness and retrofitted if necessary--a process now well under way. "[Idriss'] contributions to the public safety will be seen by the people of this state when the next earthquake rolls across California," said a prominent structural engineer who contributed to the nomination. At the moment when the 1989 earthquake started, Idriss was meeting with several other engineers on the second floor of a San Francisco high-rise, he said in a recent interview. When the others at the meeting dove beneath the conference table, Idriss was left with just a doorway for protection--and, as luck would have it, a view of buildings swaying in response to the forces he had studied throughout his career. Idriss has been involved in the follow-up analysis of every major earthquake since the 1964 Alaska quake, including those at San Fernando, Mexico City, Loma Prieta, Northridge and Kobe. His research on soil mechanics and foundation engineering has influenced the construction of dams, nuclear power plants, seaports, office buildings, residences, hospitals, railways and bridges around the world. Idriss was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989. The American Society of Civil Engineers has awarded him several high honors, including the first H. Bolton Seed Medal, in 1995, for continuing and sustained contributions to the art and science of geotechnical earthquake engineering. Tom Sallee improves math teaching Sallee has been deeply involved in working with teachers to improve mathematics instruction for 30 years. His contributions began soon after his arrival at UC Davis in 1966, when he became a consultant to two nearby public school districts that wanted to improve their mathematics programs. Those contacts inspired a collaboration with Davis fifth-grade teacher Carol Meyer on a textbook that was one of the first guides to teaching mathematical thinking to junior-high students. In 1982, Sallee was one of several mathematicians who founded the Northern California Mathematics Project, a summer institute and school-year follow-up program for teachers. For seven years, he taught teachers problem-solving in the morning and worked with them in the afternoon to integrate their new skills into lessons for their students. In 1985, his math-project work helped the developers of a new framework for teaching mathematics in California schools. In the many hours he spent with teachers, Sallee was hearing frequent pleas for better textbooks on mathematical reasoning and problem-solving. Concurrently, at UC Davis, he was finding that many first-year students were mathematically unprepared. So he applied for a grant to co-direct the writing of three high-school algebra and geometry textbooks. The series, named College Preparatory Mathematics, was created over the next six years; 60 teachers were involved in the writing, editing and pilot-testing. Once the series was completed, Sallee devised an eight-day course to teach teachers how to use the texts effectively and then taught the course himself for first five years. (Sallee has since overseen the production of another book in the series, this one on pre-calculus.) The College Preparatory Mathematics program was enthusiastically received and its use spread faster than anyone had expected. This year, teachers of 300,000 to 400,000 students in about 700 schools in California and 80 outside the state are using the books. And Sallee's studies show that students who learned from his math series score significantly better on state exams than students who didn't use those textbooks at the same school. "What comes through so clearly in Professor Sallee's long and sustained involvement to improve mathematics in the K-12 schools is, first, a commitment to the teachers themselves and, second, a willingness to do whatever is necessary to achieve improvement," wrote the two people who nominated Sallee for the public-service award--Wendell Potter, vice-chair of the physics department, and Judith Kysh, a UC Davis education extension specialist and director of the Northern California Math Project. "Grab the opportunity to honor this man," a Sacramento mathematics teacher urged Potter and Kysh. "Please let him know that what he has given is truly appreciated and that his influence has reached far and wide."