Duncan Mellichamp, a professor emeritus and a founding faculty member of the Department of Chemical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, is a 2018 recipient of the Oliver Johnson Award for Distinguished Leadership in the Academic Senate.

Presented every two years, the award recognizes UC faculty members who have provided outstanding service to the Academic Senate. It is named for Oliver Johnson, a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and longtime Senate activist. Johnson died in 2000.

“The Oliver Johnson Award for Distinguished Leadership in the Academic Senate is the highest honor given by the Academic Senate, at the systemwide level, to one of its members,” said Henning Bohn, a professor of economics at UCSB and divisional chair of the campus’s Academic Senate. “Duncan Mellichamp is a worthy and very appropriate recipient of the award, both for his service as chair of the systemwide Academic Senate and his service as chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Academic Senate.”

A particularly memorable and lasting achievement, according to Bohn, is Mellichamp’s advocacy for including same-sex domestic partners in UC employee benefits, which he successfully shepherded through a divided Board of Regents. Another: his transformative philanthropy to campus.

“At UC Santa Barbara, Duncan and his wife, Suzanne, have become well known as generous donors of endowed professorships that were allocated competitively to make multiple hires in thematically linked interdisciplinary areas,” Bohn noted. “The Mellichamp professorships have significantly boosted UC Santa Barbara’s profile in key areas of research and teaching.”