Clarivate and the Web of Science Index have included six University of Connecticut professors in their list of the world’s highest cited researchers for 2021. To qualify, researchers had to produce papers at the top 1% of citations in one of 21 fields, according to the Clarivate website. The six UConn professors included: Robin Chazdon, Yangchao Luo, Rebecca Puhl, Vijay A. Rathinam, George Weinstock and Zhe Zhu.
Chazdon, a now-retired professor of ecology and evolutionary biology living in Colorado, is still heavily involved in biology research at UConn. She began at UConn as an assistant professor in 1988 and retired in 2016, which has given her the opportunity to better focus on her research.
“My work has become increasingly interdisciplinary and relevant to global issues of climate change mitigation and adaptation and biodiversity conservation, which is why this achievement is so meaningful to me,” Chazdon said in an email interview. “As a tropical forest ecologist, my work is more widely known outside of the U.S. than within the U.S., so I am grateful for this recognition.”
Pul, another honoree, was a professor at Yale before coming to UConn as a professor in the department of human development and family sciences.
“I’m delighted that our research on weight-based bullying, stigma, and discrimination has resonated with so many scholars across different fields, and has stimulated others to pursue this area of research,” Puhl said in an email interview.
Another one of the six professors to be recognized, Weinstock, said in an email interview he is “working the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and also on the faculty at UConn Health, in the Dept. of Genetics and Genome Science.” He came to UConn in 2014 and has received this recognition all eight years.
“This would not have been possible without my fantastic lab members and the great collaborations I have had at UConn, Jackson Laboratory, and throughout the scientific community,” Weinstock said.
