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Receipt of a $4.35 million federal grant to establish the National Center for Marriage Research at BGSU is just the latest
research-related success for Dr. Wendy Manning, sociology, winner of this year’s Olscamp Research Award.
Dr. Wendy Manning |
Manning is co-director of the new center with Dr. Susan Brown, sociology, who nominated her colleague for the honor. With
the award come a $2,000 cash prize and a reserved parking spot for a year.
“Professor Manning’s scholarly productivity is truly exceptional,” wrote Brown in her nomination letter, citing publication
of articles in top journals and continuous external funding for Manning’s work. “A nationally recognized demographer, she
has made several significant contributions to knowledge about contemporary families, particularly in the areas of fertility
and family structure,” Brown added.
Manning describes herself as a family demographer who focuses on adult and adolescent relationships, with research interests
in family sociology, social demography and the life course. “I primarily focus on families and relationships that exist outside
the boundaries of marriage, including cohabitation, adolescent dating, unmarried childbearing, divorce and nonresident parenting,”
she notes in a research statement.
In 2000, Manning founded BGSU’s Center for Family and Demographic Research (CFDR), an interdisciplinary population center,
and in 2002, she obtained three years of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for the center through the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
Two years ago, in what Brown termed perhaps Manning’s “most significant research accomplishment,” she gained an additional
five years of federal support—about $1.4 million worth—for the center through a NICHD mechanism that funds only 15 population
centers nationwide. The other 14 centers are all at institutions classified as Research-I, she explained.
“Manning’s success at competing with well-established centers at larger universities is a testament to her national reputation,”
according to Brown. “Indeed, her research record and scholarly standing were critical to BGSU’s success in obtaining significant
federal funding from NIH for CFDR.”
Manning’s willingness to pursue funding for the center, as its director, “is evidence of her generosity to her colleagues
and students as well as to BGSU as an institution,” noted Brown, CFDR’s associate director.
The center has 41 faculty affiliates from several campus departments, she wrote, and Manning, who also won BGSU’s Faculty
Mentor Award in 2005, spends “countless hours” facilitating faculty research, grant activity and training. For example, she
pointed out, Manning offers faculty development awards that provide extensive mentoring to faculty as they generate their
first grant proposal. She’s also heavily involved in informal mentoring; trains several graduate students each year, giving
many an opportunity to participate in high-quality research projects, and oversees several scholarship of engagement projects,
among her other efforts at the center cited by Brown.
“Your efforts to mentor new faculty and to collaborate with your colleagues are recognized throughout the University,” said
Dr. Heinz Bulmahn, vice provost for research and Graduate College dean, in a congratulatory letter to the award-winner. “Your
work extends beyond the University and reaches well into the community, truly ‘expanding the reach.’”
Supporting Manning’s nomination, Dr. Gary Lee, sociology chair, described her “tangible assistance and inspiration to her
colleagues” as her “greatest contribution.” Wrote Lee: “She has made everyone around her better.”
Since 2004, Brown added, Manning has been elected to leadership positions in several prominent national organizations in her
field, including the Association of Population Centers and the Population Association of America; published 14 articles in
refereed journals, and was first author of half of them; authored 15 paper presentations; made five invited presentations,
and successfully competed for individual research grants. “Over the past three years, Professor Manning has skillfully juggled
eight grants, on five of which she was the principal investigator! This level of productivity is simply amazing,” Brown maintained,
calling her colleague “in a class by herself.”
“She has been amazingly successful on every dimension of performance as a researcher,” agreed Lee, saying that Manning “has
made, and continues to make, a huge mark on the literature of our field. I know of no one else in the country with this kind
of publication record.”
“She is without doubt the most accomplished scholar for her career stage with whom I have worked, and one of the leading scholars
in the country in her discipline,” he asserted. “We would not be the department or university we are today without her.”
In her research statement, Manning says social trends reflect a movement toward greater recognition and acceptance of nonmarital
families “that still represent ‘incomplete institutions’ but are clearly important emerging institutions that deserve additional
research scrutiny.”
“I hope my work will make substantive contributions to our knowledge about how family members define and understand their
obligations to each other in an era of increasing diversity and complexity of family relationships.”
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