Press Release - Regents Present Awards to 14 Faculty Members
April 12, 2002
Regents Present Awards to 14 Faculty Members for Mentoring, Public
Service, Teaching, Research, Scholarship, Creative Activity,
Collaboration
At its April 12 meeting at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC),
the University System of Maryland Board of Regents will present the Regents'
Faculty Awards for Excellence. This year, the Regents will recognize 14 faculty
members from institutions across the USM for their outstanding contributions in
one of seven areas: collaboration, mentoring, public service, teaching,
research, scholarship, and creative activity.
"As recommended by the Regents Faculty Award Committee, these 14 educators
represent the standard to which every person involved in higher education should
aspire," said Nathan A. Chapman, Jr., chairman of the Board. "Their
dedication, their spirit, and most importantly, their belief in the development
of the mind have combined to produce remarkable results. The Board is pleased to
bestow its highest honor upon them."
Each recipient of an award for mentoring, public service, teaching, and
research, scholarship, and creative activity will receive $1,000 and a plaque of
recognition for the honor. Each recipient of an award for interinstitutional
collaboration will receive $500 and a plaque.
The Board of Regents established the Faculty Awards in 1995 to publicly
recognize distinguished performance by educators and researchers within the
University System. The Regents Faculty Award Committee, made up of faculty from
the USM's research and comprehensive institutions as well as one member from the
System office staff, receives nominations from the president of each
institution, along with the nominees' portfolios. The portfolios provided
documentation of outstanding performance, during the last three years, in the
award category for which the faculty member was nominated. Each nominee must
have served as a USM faculty member for at least five years.
This year's award winners for Excellence in USM Interinstitutional
Collaboration are:
Maureen Black, professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of
Maryland, Baltimore (UMB); Howard Dubowitz, professor in the Department
of Pediatrics at UMB; and Raymond Starr, professor in the Department of
Psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). For more than
a decade, Black, Dubowitz, and Starr - nationally and internationally recognized
scholars - have engaged in collaborative research in the area of child abuse and
neglect. Most research in this area is retrospective, examining families after
the occurrence of abuse and neglect. In response to a request for proposals from
the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, the team developed a proposal
for a longitudinal project that examines individual, familial, and environmental
factors related to maltreatment of children and reveals factors that may buffer
some children from the effects of maltreatment. The researchers have followed
the children in these families from infancy through the teen years; the plan is
to study these families until the children are 20 years old. Black, Dubowitz,
and Starr have obtained over $6 million in funding support over the years, have
published their work in premier scholarly journals, and have mentored more than
100 undergraduate and graduate students. Their findings have appeared in
journals such as Child Development and American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. More
than 50 undergraduates have been collaboratively mentored as they engaged in
data collection, coding, analysis, and other aspects of project management.
Cynthia Cates, associate professor in the Department of Social Science at
Towson University; and Wayne McIntosh, associate professor in the
Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College
Park (UMCP). Since 1998, Cates and McIntosh have developed and delivered Law
On-Line, which has become a model of inter-university collaboration. This
course, taught simultaneously at Towson and UMCP, examines the role of law in
supporting, shaping, and responding to the social order in the U.S. Law On-line
is innovative in its reliance on the Internet for legal research and the use of
Internet communications to create a forum for discussions, among students at
both institutions, of issues and for collaboration on research projects. Cates
and McIntosh have presented their online course model and their study findings
at four professional conferences, have written about their course in a journal
article, and in 2001, published the book Law and the Web of Society. It is the
leading guide for conducting research via the Internet and is an invaluable
resource for undergraduate and graduate students engaging in social-science
research on the Internet.
This year's award winner for Excellence in Mentoring is:
Phyllis R. Robinson, associate professor in the Department of Biological
Sciences at UMBC. Since coming to UMBC in 1992, Robinson has acted as mentor and
advisor to 16 undergraduates pursuing degrees in the sciences (of whom nine are
women and four are minorities). She also has served as mentor to six graduate
students - two of whom have earned doctorates and two of whom have earned
master's. She and her students study the vertebrate visual system, examining the
conversion of light into biological signals and investigating the visual system
of aquatic mammals. Her research has been widely recognized through
peer-reviewed publications and success in obtaining extramural funding. Thus
far, 12 of the students mentored by Robinson have graduated. All are pursuing
careers in biomedical research - a testimony to the efficacy of her careful,
knowledgeable, and achievement-oriented mentoring. Robinson has also been
involved in addressing the continuing structural barriers that impede women's
achievement in the sciences and engineering. She chaired the provost's ad hoc
committee on gender equity in science, mathematics, information technology, and
engineering, and helped create Women in Science and Engineering, a group whose
goal is "to build a network of information, support and encouragement for
women students in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering disciplines."
This year's award winners for Excellence in Public Service are:
Thomas C. Malone, professor at the University of Maryland Center for
Environmental Science (UMCES); and Patricia Campbell, associate professor
of curriculum and instruction at UMCP. Over the past four years, Malone served
the state, the nation, and the world through his extraordinary commitment to and
forward-looking leadership in employing technology to benefit the more than
one-half of Earth's inhabitants who reside in coastal zones. In recent years, he
has created mechanisms to address two related and pressing problems - closing
the gap between environmental science and its application and improving
humankind's ability to detect and predict changes in coastal ecosystems that
increase human vulnerability to natural hazards and diminish the ecosystem's
ability to support valued goods and services. Because of his efforts, there has
been significant progress in the use of coastal ocean observing systems for
protection from devastating storms and for management of rich coastal resources
and critical ecosystems on a sustainable basis. The vehicles for his
contributions include the Coastal Oceans Observations Panel of the
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, which he co-chaired. This panel has
been charged with developing the coastal components of the Global Ocean
Observing System and involves scientists, government officials, and other
stakeholders. Malone also co-chaired a committee established by the National
Ocean Research Leadership Council to design a national ocean-observing system.
His contributions are even more remarkable when his service during most of this
period as Director of the Horn Point Laboratory at UMCES is taken into
consideration. Campbell has devoted her academic career to understanding,
influencing, and improving the ways public schools define and develop
mathematics curricula, organize for teaching, and develop assessment schemes for
their teachers and pupils. She has worked collaboratively with public schools to
develop jointly an understanding of the role of the many stakeholders of the
system, including university professors and others in higher education, before
becoming part of large school-based projects. From 1989 to 1997, Campbell led a
multi-year research/instructional leadership project in Montgomery County Public
Schools. It demonstrated that teachers can deliver mathematics instruction in
more meaningful ways and that students can achieve in mathematics regardless of
race, ethnicity or gender. In 1996, Dr. Campbell began a long-term project with
Baltimore City Public Schools, Project MARS (Mathematics: Application and
Reasoning Skills). It addresses systemic reform in K-5 mathematics, focusing on
professional development as the vehicle for yielding increased student
achievement. Campbell has said that the most daunting task associated with
Project MARS was curriculum reform. She assumed the responsibility for
developing a K-5 curriculum at no charge, writing on evenings, weekends, and
holidays over the course of a year, modifying the curriculum the following year,
and then completely revising it to incorporate newly released Maryland State
Outcomes and Standards for Mathematics. As a result of her efforts and those of
other participants, this project is beginning to reform the public elementary
schools in Baltimore. In 2000, the Maryland Council of Teachers of Mathematics
named Campbell their Outstanding College Professor.
This year's award winners for Excellence in Teaching are:
Edwin Duncan, associate professor of English at Towson University; Edward
Orser, professor of American Studies at UMBC; and Phillip G. Sokolove,
professor of biological sciences at UMBC. Nationally recognized as a leading
scholar of Chaucer and medieval English literature as well as English rhetoric
and the history of the English language, Duncan integrates his scholarship with
his teaching. He is the official advisor to 21 undergraduate English majors and
several master's students. Students literally wait in line to register for his
courses, a testimony to his abilities in the classroom. According to his
department chair, he is a highly popular teacher but also "one of the two
toughest graders in the department." Duncan's teaching is especially
distinctive for his use of new technologies in powerful, astute, and highly
imaginative ways. At Towson, he has been a pioneer in employing web-based
experiences to engage, enrich, and extend student learning well beyond the
ordinary boundaries of study. As demonstrated by his interactive
"Electronic Edition of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales," his contribution to web-enhanced instruction is
transformative. Faculty and students alike have praised the latest web
scholarship by Duncan as a stellar teaching aid, one that enhances the joy of
discovery in both teaching and learning. The site has been visited over
13,000 times since its debut in November 2000. Duncan also is a stellar teacher
of teachers. In 2000-01, he presented three conference papers and served as
session organizer and chair of three more sessions. A full professor since 1994,
Orser served as chair of UMBC's American Studies Department for many years. His
leadership has been key to the department's achievement of a reputation for
excellence in undergraduate education. Orser regularly teaches courses ranging
from introductory general-education courses to specialized upper-level courses
required for the major. His course "Community in American Culture" is
a model in the field, and he continues to design innovative classes.
"American Environments: Landscape and Culture" and "Recent
Immigrant and Refugee Experiences" are two of his most recent offerings.
Orser also regularly teaches honors courses. UMBC has recognized his prowess by
presenting him with the 1998 three-year Presidential Teaching Scholar
Award, which he just completed. Since joining the faculty in 1974, Sokolove has
taught graduate and undergraduate courses in biological sciences while
conducting research supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the
National Institutes of Health and publishing in major neuroscience and
physiology journals on topics ranging from circadian rhythms to slug
neuroendocrinology. Sokolove was UMBC's institutional representative to
the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation (MCTP), a five-year $6
million program to develop a new approach to pre-service teacher training in
science and mathematics. In 1994, after returning to his home department
following some years in administrative positions, Sokolove began to implement
instructional changes in Biology 100, a large-enrollment class for majors. The
changes, consistent with MCTP goals, were advocated by major science
organizations and agencies. Without changing course content, Sokolove radically
altered the way Biology 100 students learned: He employed peer interaction and
problem solving in small cooperative learning groups, whole-class discussions
accomplished with the aid of wireless microphones, name badges, short research
papers, an emphasis on student questioning, and coverage of general biology
content driven by students' questions and interests.
The award winners for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative
Activity are:
James M. Hagberg, professor of kinesiology and assistant dean for
research at UMCP; Joel Liebman, professor of chemistry and biochemistry
at UMBC; and George Plitnik, professor of physics at Frostburg State
University. Hagberg is known as the founder of "kinesiogenomics," a
discipline that focuses on the relationship of exercise to maintenance of health
and prevention of disease in middle-aged and older individuals. His research has
resulted in four patent applications, 120 articles in refereed journals, and
many book chapters. He has received more than $7.5 million in federal funding in
the last five years, and is the recipient of the university's Life Sciences
Inventor of the Year Award. Liebman has achieved an extraordinary research
record in chemical theory. He has published 266 titles in chemistry, including
refereed articles in leading journals, books, book chapters, and 17 electronic
databases. In the last three years alone, he has produced 35 journal articles
and one book. He has also been credited with naming several chemical compounds.
In fact, in recognition of his many contributions and national and international
reputation, Liebman was named the Maryland Chemist of the Year in 1998.
Plitnik's research, related to musical instrumentation, has influenced the
design and manufacture of French horns currently used by various symphonic
groups. His research, published in encyclopedia articles and peer-reviewed
journals, has earned him the respect of his peers worldwide. Plitnik has also
given students the opportunity to participate in his scholarship. In fact, a
Frostburg honors student co-presented research on pipe-organ reeds with Plitnik
during an international conference in Rome.
Contact:
Chris Hart
Phone: 301/445-2739
E-mail: chart@usmd.edu
