Convocation recognizes achievers

WSU’s top faculty and students will be recognized during Honors Convocation Friday, March 5, at 7 p.m. in the Hughes Metropolitan Complex.

Fourteen faculty, including the recipient of the new Excellence in Creative Activity award, will be honored for their achievements. More than 550 students in various honor societies and holding a 3.75 or higher grade point average have been invited.

Following are the faculty award winners.

Excellence in Teaching

Stephen Porter, assistant professor, marketing
As an MBA student at WSU, Porter was struck by the teaching style of Bob Ross, chair and associate professor, department of marketing and entrepreneurship. Since then he has tried to model what helped him succeed in Ross’ classes: “Be tough but with a sense of humor. Make class fun, but challenging.” Indeed, that concept has gotten through to the students. One remarked, “He makes class fun by being a person and not just a teacher.”

Porter, who teaches an undergraduate class in consumer behavior and a graduate class in marketing management, encourages students to think about their own reactions to marketing strategies and promotes “lots of discussion, lots of interaction.”

Kent Thomas, visiting instructor, biological sciences
Medical news abounds in the mainstream media so the dialogue in Thomas’ immunology class often includes probing questions on both his and the students’ parts. Teaching a class that is “so current and hot,” as Thomas puts it, requires twice-a-week reading sessions at libraries at WSU and the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita. Thomas feels it’s his job to piece together current information, gathered from those reading sessions or conversations with researchers at other universities, and present that to the students.

 

Thomas also relishes teaching the introductory class, “The Human Organism,” to non-biology majors. “I enjoy it because it gives me a chance to see people in other majors and show them why some of us do this for a career and why it interests us.”

 

Leadership in the Advancement of Teaching

Erach Talaty, professor, chemistry
Certain teachers stand out for what they can teach in a classroom; others make an impression for who they are as a person. Talaty is a combination of both to his students. He anticipates difficulties students may have in understanding chemistry, often stereotyped as a difficult subject, and gets to know his students as individuals. He conveys how simple chemistry can be by relating it to everyday functions. Eating and digesting foods, taking medicines, wearing clothes — “chemistry is all around us,” Talaty explains. He spends countless hours with students outside of the classroom, in extensive help sessions and in conversation. “I like to know who they are,” he says of his students. “They’re not just faces and names.” He spends many hours helping students prepare for medical school exams.

His contributions to the department and his profession are many, as well. Talaty, who holds two doctorates, serves as a role model for younger chemistry faculty, according to his department chair. His published articles have provided ideas now incorporated into undergraduate organic chemistry.

 

Excellence in Research

Ramesh Agarwal, executive director, National Institute for Aviation Research, and Bloomfield Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering
Agarwal is a scientist of international stature. He has made significant contributions in the field of computational fluid dynamics and computational physics, and has been recognized by national and international awards, fellowships in national and international professional societies, and  invited lectureships throughout the world.

During the four years Agarwal has been at Wichita State, he has been successful in receiving peer-reviewed research grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Defense totaling more than $1.5 million.

In 1995, Agarwal established a major research consortium, the Aircraft Design and Manufacturing Research Center which has an annual budget of approximately $1 million with support from the aviation industry and the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp. Faculty members and graduate students from three other regents universities and WSU participate in the consortium.

W. Robert Carper, professor, chemistry
Carper’s research has run the gamut from identification of explosives, to studying how to remove pollutants from soil, to figuring out how certain enzymes work in our body. While the subjects are varied, there is a theme that permeates those areas: pioneering. More than a decade ago he and other researchers funded by U.S. Air Force grants started researching explosives. Their pioneering research into TNT identification is now being used by law enforcement and other government agencies when it comes to following terrorists using TNT and developing mass spectral studies of the explosive.

An explosion of another kind —technology — has led to the current pioneering work Carper does. While the use of NMR spectrometers, a device that operates on the same principal as an MRI, is common in chemistry labs, the technique Carper uses is unique. Only a handful of chemists in the world use the relaxation technique, which is based on how samples respond to a pulse. He uses it to determine how to remove pollutants from dirt and how the body metabolizes glucose. His work includes building models to analyze how metals bind to soil molecules and to sugar in the body.

Carper has generated more than $1 million in grants and fellowships and more than 100 publications.

 

Excellence in Creative Activity

Leroy Clark, professor and chair, School of Performing Arts
Teacher, playwright, director, and mentor, Clark’s work has culminated in a banner start to 1999. His play “Shakespeare’s Journey,” written over a period of more than two years, was a WSU Mainstage production in December and was selected for a staged reading at the annual regional American College Theatre Festival in January. Clark’s job as professor includes inspiring creativity among his students. Playwright and former performing arts student Jeannine Saunders, who recently won WSU’s national playwriting contest, said of Clark, “I came to WSU to learn to write plays, and I learned how to do that from Dr. Leroy Clark.”

Clark was just named one of four 1999 Kansas Arts Commission fellowship winners. He’s won numerous awards for his work including the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Award for his play “Rebel.” Clark directed Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” for WSU’s Mainstage Theatre, which was chosen from 165 entries in an eight-state region to participate in the regional ACTF last year.

 

Young Faculty Scholar

S. Hossein Cheraghi, assistant professor, industrial and manufacturing engineering
It hasn’t taken long for Cheraghi to make his mark. Since coming to the university in August 1993, Cheraghi has been recognized as a published scholar, effective teacher, and quality researcher.

Cheraghi has published more than 40 technical articles in well-known scientific journals. He also has been active in developing a solid research program, receiving funding in excess of $1 million.

Teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, Cheraghi has developed a number of very popular graduate courses, and the number of graduate students (20) who have earned master’s and doctoral degrees under his guidance demonstrates his success.

A WSU colleague says, “He has the ingenuity, intuition, and feeling for the work in combining his academic skills with the real-life engineering industrial practice.”

 

Academy for Effective Teaching awards

Harold Edwards, associate professor, communicative disorders and sciences
Edwards co-created an innovative program to help non-native English speakers to modify accent and dialect. Prior to coming to WSU in 1971, Edwards taught English for nearly 10 years in Costa Rica.

Edwards is the CDS undergraduate coordinator, meeting with undergraduate, high school, and community college students who are considering a major in communicative disorders and sciences. A student commented that Edwards “is tough, but he makes learning fun with his sense of humor.”

Vernon Keel, professor, Elliott School of Communication
A professor once told Keel, still a graduate student at the University of Minnesota at the time, that “teaching to make learning difficult is easy.” During a teaching career that has spanned more than three decades, Keel has taken special effort to not make learning difficult to the thousands of students who have sat in his classroom. Recalling his own experiences as a student, Keel says the professors who were the best at their craft were those who made their expectations clear.

“One thing I have come to learn, however, is that they (students) often don’t know what to expect of themselves, and that it is up to us to help them understand what we expect of them.”

Mary Lescoe-Long, assistant professor, public health sciences
Very active in research, Lescoe-Long is conducting a continuing study on the social psychology of people who have been medically diagnosed with high cholesterol levels.

One student says, “If this program has all their instructors teach like Dr. Lescoe-Long, the students would be knocking down the doors to attend WSU.”

Denise Maseman, assistant professor and interim chair, dental hygiene
Maseman’s practical and clinical experience and her extensive involvement in professional organizations for 20 years is a testament to her philosophy she shares with students: “Dental hygiene professionals must be lifelong, independent learners. Dental hygiene has been very good to me and I want to convey to students my pride in my profession.”

Maseman’s use of computer technology in the classroom and clinic has greatly increased. For example, she uses a wand-like devise that projects live color video pictures of patients’ mouths onto a computer screen. She also works with a digital X-ray system which uses sensors in the mouth rather than film, so pictures can be stored on a computer, manipulated to improve contrast, density, and size, then printed and converted into slides or overheads for classroom application.

Peer Moore-Jansen, associate professor, anthropology
The role of a college professor carries with it many responsibilities, in Moore-Jansen’s view. Researcher, messenger, facilitator, mentor, adviser are just a few of the roles a professor must perform, he says. “Clearly, my responsibilities as a teacher in and out of the classroom are many-fold and include professional responsibilities both to my field of study, my colleagues and department, the university, and most of all, my students or student audiences.”

The seriousness with which he approaches these roles is reflected in his accomplishments. He often includes his students in his research, listing them as co-authors in publications.. “Some of my colleagues shudder at my devotion to including students as co-authors; I take great pride in doing so,” he says.

Prakash Ramanan, associate professor, computer science
Ramanan believes his primary responsibility as a teacher is to teach students to think. “It is not enough if they know the solution to some problem/question; they should know how to arrive at that solution in a logical manner. I want to teach them the key concepts and help them develop their analytical skills so that they can think logically and develop the solutions on their own.” For Ramanan, this philosophy of “teaching thinking” rather than just teaching solutions is analogous to the adage, give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.

David Wright, assistant professor and graduate coordinator, sociology
If there’s a prevailing philosophy that permeates Wright’s teaching, it is to question what is presented as fact or truth. He reminds his students that interpretations of facts, whether it be in a textbook, an article, or even his class lectures, are often presented with the biases of the person compiling the data. It’s all a matter of perspective, says Wright. “Race, gender, family, socio-economic status — all have a bearing,” he says.

He rarely uses a textbook in his class, reminding students that a textbook offers one perspective. Using his research and that of others in his field, along with other sources, he provides a variety of viewpoints on particular topics. One student raved, “(His) teaching techniques are great!”

— Amy Geiszler-Jones, Julie Rausch and
Joseph Kleinsasser