One produced 12 research papers in a single year. Another has translated his research into seven patents. Both have served tirelessly in leadership roles on campus while also delivering top-notch learning experiences for students. 

Professors Ben Elias of the Mathematics Department and Mike Pluth of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department received the prestigious CAS Collegiate Faculty Award, the highest honor the College of Arts and Sciences awards to active tenure-track faculty members. 

The award recognizes faculty who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and made outstanding contributions to their field—as well as to the broader UO community. 

"The Collegiate Faculty Award is the highest honor the college bestows on tenure-track faculty,” said Chris Poulsen, Tykeson Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “This year’s recipients exemplify the very best of the professoriate. They have shown an exceptional commitment to student success, meaningful service to the university community, and scholarly excellence through innovative, field-defining research." 

View the full list of 2025 CAS Award winners. 

Ben Elias: 'Superhuman' energy and devotion 

To understand what makes Ben Elias extraordinary, you need to know a few things about mathematics: Research papers take years to publish. They often remain relevant for decades. And finishing two per year is considered highly productive for the field. Elias posted 12 papers last year alone. 

“It’s completely unreasonable and impossible, but it happened,” he said. “My collaborators all lined up to help. Now... if I do 12 more this year, I'll finally be caught up with my backlog!” 

Elias is a world-renowned expert on representation theory—the study of symmetry in linear spaces—and a self-described "expliciter.” He thrives on finding ways to make complicated constructions accessible, easily computable and explicit. 

“Once you make things explicit and can really compute and get to know them and internalize them, then it is easier to notice patterns and connections between things, and that leads to more interesting research,” he said. 

With multiple projects in the hopper at any given time, Elias tackles his work in the Mathematics Department with the utmost dedication, said Dan Dugger, department head, who described the professor as having "superhuman levels of energy and devotion."

That energy carries over into the classroom, where Elias instructs students to interrupt him frequently to ensure he doesn’t go too fast. 

He also learns all of his students’ names before the first day of class, assigns homework in small daily chunks for more effective learning, gives weekly quizzes for extra credit so students can get stress-free exam practice, and combats pluralistic ignorance by asking questions of the whole class and urging students to shout out the answers all together. 

“It takes a few weeks for students to warm to this, but it really helps in the end,” he said. “When a student thinks, ‘I don't understand, but everyone else seems to and no one is complaining, and that one loud guy seems to know the answer, so I'll just stay quiet,’ then typically actually a LOT of students are thinking the same thing. When they all have to yell out their wrong answers at the same time, everyone realizes they're not alone.” 

While Elias calls these practices “idiosyncracies,” his students have cited them as qualities that make him an excellent math teacher. “He puts an enormous amount of thought into designing his courses and an enormous amount of effort into helping students,” Dugger said. 

In addition to running a summer graduate program called WARTHOG for several years, Elias served as chair of the department’s climate and hiring committees, where he revamped hiring protocols to address bias in evaluating candidates and initiated a statistical analysis of courses with inequities in student noncompletion rates. He's now directing a peer mentorship pilot program for first-year math majors—an initiative proposed by undergrad student Makenna Greenwalt. 

“Honestly I just like helping people learn—and sharing cool and elegant things,” Elias said. “It is almost palpable, that moment when a student, after working hard, finally realizes the pattern and the idea clicks into place for them.”   

Mike Pluth: Innovator and ‘fixer’ 

When the COVID pandemic shut down activity on campus, Mike Pluth helped research labs, particularly those in the natural sciences, stay up and running. 

As one of the university’s Associate Vice Presidents for Research, he’s become known as something of a “fixer” for campus research facilities—the go-to person for responding to an equipment crisis, relocating research groups during building renovations, and developing pandemic-safe lab protocols. 

“Getting to interact with people all across campus and learn about their bottlenecks and challenges was a great way to broaden my perspective,” the chemistry and biochemistry professor said of his leadership role. “Enabling research to be carried out on campus as safely as possible during the pandemic was probably one of the more rewarding experiences in my time at the research office.” 

In his own lab, Pluth investigates the role of sulfur—the element known for its “rotten egg” smell—in living cells and other environments. His research team has developed innovative tools for detecting, delivering and quantifying small-molecule sulfur-containing species, which act as signal transmitters within living systems and have attracted significant interest for their potential applications as both research and pharmacological tools. 

“Sulfur was one of the primary energy sources on earth before there was oxygen,” Pluth said. “Every living organism has a rich vestigial sulfur economy that contributes to energy production and signaling. It’s an exciting area where chemists can bring insight about chemical reactivity to design and develop tools that can poke and prod different systems.” 

Pluth has translated his fundamental science research into over 100 published scientific articles and seven university-issued patents, including a delivery system for biological hydrogen sulfide (H2S) that fluoresces upon release, allowing for real-time monitoring within the body. His approaches to H2S and carbonyl sulfide delivery have been widely adopted in the field, said Vickie De Rose, head of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department. 

Pluth's research “has led to tremendous advances in the fields of bioorganic, bioinorganic, and chemical biology,” De Rose said. “A major theme running through his work is rigorous, ambitious science that is unafraid to tackle very challenging topics.” 

Pluth’s get-it-done attitude crosses over into his teaching practice, as well.  

He teaches the department’s Physical Organic Chemistry course and co-developed a Fellowship and Application Skills course to help students apply for prestigious National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships—resulting in a six-fold increase in the number of UO chemistry students who received fellowships. He also co-launched the Molecular Sensors and Biotechnology graduate internship program, which is housed in the Knight Campus and boasts a job placement rate above 90%. 

Whether he’s teaching undergrads and grad students in the classroom or mentoring them in the lab, his aim is to give them opportunities to engage with the material in a variety of different ways.  

“One-size-fits-all doesn’t fit well with teaching and learning,” he said, adding, “For undergrads in my research group, one of my goals is to get them experience in the lab and help them figure out if this is a type of science they like doing. Being the one who runs the experiment and tests the hypothesis is really eye opening and helps them refine what they want to do.” 

—By Nicole Krueger, College of Arts and Sciences