COLLEGE HONORS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
The College of Arts and Sciences celebrated Black History Month by
spotlighting many of our
renowned African-American faculty members, past and present.
Throughout the month of February, inspiring pioneers and outstanding role models were featured on social media for their contributions to OU and society. Among those honored have been Yvonne Fonteneau (English), Walter L. Dillard (zoology, pictured), Charles Butler (education and human relations) and George
Richter-Addo (chemistry and biochemistry).
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COLLEGE FACULTY AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED
Each year, the College of Arts and Sciences honors faculty who show commitment, skill, effectiveness, impact and leadership in teaching and scholarship. This year's winners will be honored at Kaleidoscope Evening on March 2.
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Phil Gibson,
associate professor of biology
Longmire Prize for Teaching
This prize is supported through an estate gift from William and Jane Longmire and is given to a faculty member who has the rank of assistant professor or higher who exhibits a scholarly and thoughtful approach to innovative thinking.
Gibson actively incorporated student-centered teaching techniques. His case study classroom activities are published at the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science. He
has received two NSF grants, one for his research on teaching evolution and the other for sponsoring an
educational conference. He teaches courses in Evolution, Ecology and Diversity, Introduction to Biology and Economic Botany.
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Miriam Gross, associate professor history/international and area studies
John H. and Jane M. Patten Teaching Award
Established by John and Jane Patten, this award is given to a faculty member in the humanities or social sciences who has made an outstanding contribution as a classroom instructor. Gross teaches courses in East Asia since 1600, Modern China, Global Environment and Disease Crises Capstone and Power and Inequality in the Global Community. Her research focuses on the intersection between modern Chinese history, the history of disease and public health.
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Marielle Hoefnagels, associate professor biology/microbiology and plant biology
James and JoAnn Holden Faculty Award
The James and JoAnn Holden Faculty Award recognizes outstanding faculty who inspire freshman and sophomore students through their willingness to teach, encourage and support students’ transition into higher education. Hoefnagels has been an instructor for the university for more than 20 years. She has written two university-level textbooks on biology for McGraw-Hill. Her book
Biology: Concepts and Investigations, 4th ed.
is a recipient of a
TAA 2018 Textbook Excellence Award
.
She currently teaches courses in Concepts in Biology, BioWriting and General Mycology.
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Ben Holt
associate professor microbiology and plant biology
Kinney-Sugg Outstanding Professor Award
Established by Sandy Kinney and Mike Sugg, it is given to an outstanding faculty member who is a model teacher and an outstanding scholar. Holt teaches a wide range of courses, including Practical Bioinformatics, which he developed, and Advanced Molecular Biology, which he co-developed. His research is focused on transcription factors in plants and how they function in flowering time and hormone response. His work in this area has important implications for understanding plant growth and productivity.
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Samuel Perry, assistant professor sociology
Irene Rothbaum Award
Established by Julian Rothbaum in his wife’s memory, it is given to a tenure-track assistant professor who is a model teacher and is demonstrating significant scholarly accomplishmen
t.
Perry teaches courses in Sociology of Religion, Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups, Race and Religion and Sociology and Religion. He is described as "an extremely thorough and amazing teacher." In just two years after earning his doctorate, he has published 48 articles. He is also on Sociology’s undergraduate committee, which plans the undergraduate curriculum and selects scholarship awardees.
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DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI LECTURE SERIES SCHEDULED
The college will honor four alumni at
Kaleidoscope Evening on March 2
.
Marvin Williams, Lisa Riggs and Kevin Bales will be honored as distinguished alumni and Allyson Reneau will receive the Outstanding Young Alumna Award. Prior to that, the three distinguished alumni winners will give lectures on Thursday, March 1. The schedule for the lectures, which are free and open to the public follows:
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Marvin Williams - '89, B.S. in Zoology
Opioid Abuse In Pregnancy
11 a.m., March 1, Dale Hall Tower Ninth Floor
Marvin Williams
is a board-certified maternal-fetal medicine specialist. Maternal-fetal medicine specialists are obstetricians who completed more training in the diagnosis, treatment and ongoing care of complicated pregnancies. He completed a fellowship in maternal fetal medicine at The Ohio State University Medical Center, where he also completed his obstetrics-gynecology residency. Williams served in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps, and earned the Bronze Star Medal in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom V.
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Lisa Riggs - '82, B.A. in Political Science; '84, M.A. in Sociology
Tribal Sovereignty and Jurisdiction in Oklahoma: A Peek at the Past and Present
3 p.m., March 1, Dale Hall Tower Ninth Floor
Lisa Riggs
is a partner in the law firm of Riggs, Abney, Neal, Turpen, Orbison, and Lewis, Inc. Her areas of specialty include civil litigation, mediation, medical malpractice, personal injury and product liability law. Riggs earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and her master’s degree in sociology from OU, and earned her juris doctorate from Georgetown Law Center. After practicing for many years in the D.C. area, Riggs moved home to Tulsa in 1996.
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Kevin Bales - '74, B.A. in Anthropology
Unlocking the Science of Slavery
4:30 p.m., March 1, Dale Hall Tower Ninth Floor
Kevin Bales
co-founded the NGO Free the Slaves after going undercover to meet slaves and slaveholders. The results of this research became his book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Currently, Bales serves as a professor of contemporary slavery in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham.
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ASTROPHYSICISTS DISCOVER PLANETS IN EXTRAGALATIC GALAXIES
A
University of Oklahoma astrophysics team has discovered for the first time a population of planets beyond the Milky Way. Xinyu Dai, professor in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, OU College of Arts and Sciences, with OU postdoctoral researcher Eduardo Guerras, made the discovery with data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope in space that is controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
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COLLEGE TO OFFER FOUR PRESIDENTIAL DREAM COURSES IN 2018-19
S
everal faculty members have been chosen to design presidential dream courses for the 2018-19 academic year. In 2004-05, President David Boren began a program to give extra funds to enhance courses already scheduled for the academic year. This fund provides the ability to bring in several experts in the field during the semester to interact with the students and to give a lecture open to the public. The following proposals have been selected:
Fall 2018
Spring 2019
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PAM OLSON VENNERBERG HONORED AT OKLAHOMA MENTOR DAY
College of Arts and Sciences Board of Advocates member Pam Olson Vennerberg was one of 70 mentors from
Oklahoma who were honored during the
sixth annual Oklahoma Mentor Day.
Held in conjunction with National Mentoring Month in January, Oklahoma Mentor Day honors outstanding mentors who have been selected by mentoring organizations across the state. The goal of the event is to recognize
exceptional mentors from all types of youth mentoring programs and to provide fun, educational activities for the honorees and their mentees to share. Vennerberg was recognized for her commitment to two OU students, political science and history major Jesse Hare and letters and history major Dylan Rudolf, whom she mentors through the Withrow Leadership Scholars progra
m.
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MATH STUDENTS TRAVEL TO CONFERENCES
Several students in the department of mathematics have traveled to conferences across the country this year.
Undergraduate students attended the 12th annual Texas Oklahoma Undergraduate Symposium in Wichita Falls, Texas in Feb. The group (pictured right) included Sawyer Robertson, Bennett Rennier, David McKnight, Abigail Hardin, Jackson Knox, Emma DiAngeli, Hira Ahmed,Corinne Morgan and Phil Collins. This event provided an opportunity for students to present their research in a formal setting. Additionally, the symposium featured a math jeopardy competition, won by Rennier, McKnight and Hardin.
Robertson earned an award for an outstanding poster during his trip in to the Joint Math Meeting in San Diego, Calif., in January Robertson's poster featured his research on Boundary Value Problems and Green's Functions on Magnetic Graphs.
Amanda Ahadizadeh and Olivia Conway, and graduate student, Erin Hausmann, traveled to 20th annual Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in January.
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$528,874 - INSTITUTE
FOR MUSEUM AND LIBRARY SERVICES
NAVIGATING SCREENS: LIBRARIES AS COMMUNITY HUBS FOR TEACHING POSITIVE SCREEN MEDIA PRACTICES
June Abbas will collaborate with Rebekah Willett from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (lead institution) and Denise Agosto from Drexel to explore the increasingly critical issue of teaching youth (ages 5-11), through their parents and caregivers, how to be safe, healthy screen media users. The researchers will work to discover family media practices and develop screen media education training modules for public librarians working with parents and other caregivers of children.
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N
OEL BRADY, KERI KORNELSON, DEBORAH MOORE-RUSSO, MILSO SAVIC (MATHEMATICS)
$93,298 - ASSOCIATION OF PUBLIC AND LAND GRANT UNIVERSITIES
A National Science Foundation-funded initiative aimed at expanding the use of "active learning" techniques in introductory mathematics courses is expanding from three to 12 universities, including OU. The project, known as
SEMINAL: Student Engagement in Mathematics through an Institutional Network for Active Learning
, has seen universities rework their math curricula to improve student success in early courses, particularly students from underrepresented minority groups. OU's adoption of active learning pedagogy in the MATH 1523 (Pre-Calculus) course has placed it in a small cohort nationwide.
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$15,000 - LINCOLN INSTITUTE OF LAND POLICY
LOCATION-BASED DEVELOPMENT IMPACT FEES AND NEW BUSINESS LOCATION DECISIONS
Using a quasi-experimental borders approach, this research examines the causes and consequences of development impact fee programs that now spans four decades. While meaningful contributions to the theory of land value capture are present in this literature, surprisingly little is known about how residential and commercial impact fee programs influence the spatial distribution of firms. This study seeks to empirically investigate the effects of commercial and residential impact fees on the location of new business establishments.
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$12,000 -
STATE OF OKLAHOMA WILDLIFE CONSERVATION DEPARTMENT
OKLAHOMA DEPARTMENT OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION DEPARTMENT
This project is part of an ongoing relationship with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation to assess the type and frequency of game harvesting activities throughout Oklahoma as well as to understand attitudes about the availability of game and harvesting locales by those with active hunting licenses during the prior calendar year. OU POLL is responsible for all data entry for those respondents returning a paper survey from a sample of all registered hunters as well as for contacting any non-responders to the mail survey and conducting interviews via telephone to all avenues for assuring participation are provided to the population of interest.
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$91,700 - UNITED SPACE RESEARCH ASSOCIATIN
OUTFLOW ENERGETICS IN THE HEART OF NGC 1333: FIFI-LS SPECTROSCOPY OF THE SVS13/HH 7-11 REGION
This project will use the
SOFIA observatory (operated by NASA) and a re-purposed 747 aircraft with a 2.7-meter infrared telescope mounted inside to conduct observations of newborn stars about 750 light years away. The observations will examine the newborn stars for emission of the carbon monoxide molecule, but targeting far-infrared spectral lines that trace gas that has been heated to about 1000 Kelvin. This research will help understand the impact a star formation has on the surrounding gas cloud and if this helps or hinders future star formation.
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NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
CAREER AWARD MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS AND NUMERICAL METHODS OF UNDERGROUND OIL RECOVERY MODELS
The goal of this project is to perform research in the mathematical analysis and high order accuracy numerical methods design for the PDE models describing the water-drive secondary underground oil recovery. Wang is the second OU mathematics faculty member to receive an NSF Career award in the past two years (Jing Tao, Coarse Geometry and Quasimorphisms.
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$10,307 - HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER
OKLAHOMA LEND: MCH INTERDISCIPLINARY CORE FACULTY MEMBER
Steven Wells has been named Core Faculty member for Social Work for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) program at the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center for 2018. LEND provides long-term, graduate level interdisciplinary training for allied health providers to improve the health of infants, children, and adolescents with disabilities. As Core Faculty member, Wells mentors the graduate social work student selected for the program each year, provides cross disciplinary mentoring to the other allied health interns selected for the program, and lectures twice each school year for the LEND Seminar. He has served in this capacity since 2001.
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WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston was awarded a 2017 $229,772 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant to launch the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship. OU SLIS is one of five partner programs and has received two funded fellowship positions for graduate students to work in 2018 on the digital preservation of historically significant media broadcasts. OU SLIS fellows will work with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority.
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HEATHER SHOTTON:
RECLAIMING INDIGENOUS RESEARCH IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Heather Shotton,
associate professor Native American Studies, explores how recent
Native scholars have started to reclaim research through the development of their own research methodologies and paradigms that are based in tribal knowledge systems and values, and that allow inherent Indigenous knowledge and lived experiences to strengthen the research.
Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education
highlights the current scholarship emerging from these scholars of higher education
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HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS WINS 2018 HARPER LEE AWARD
The award is made to a living, nationally recognized Alabama writer who has made a significant lifelong contribution to Alabama letters. Jeffers will receive the honor during a gala dinner at the
Alabama Writers Symposium
in Monroeville, Ala., on April 19. She is a graduate of the University of Alabama’s MFA Writing program.
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VICTORIA STURTEVANT HONORED BY POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION
Victoria Sturtevant
(associate dean and associate professor of Film and Media Studies) has been honored by the Popular Culture Association for
Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy
as the winner of the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies in Popular and American Culture. The award will be formally presented at the annual conference in Indianapolis to the book of original essays by the leading authorities on women’s comedy surveys the disorderly, subversive and unruly performances of women comics from silent film to contemporary multimedia.
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KUZNETS PRIZE AWARDED TO CHUNBEI WANG AND LE WANG
Chunbei Wang
(assistant professor of Economics) and
Le Wang
(
Chong K. Liew Chair, associate professor in Economics)
have received the 2018 Kuznets Prize for their article “
Knot yet: Minimum marriage age law, marriage delay, and earnings,
”
which was published in the Journal of Population Economics. The annual prize honors the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics in the previous year. The prize was given at a dinner event of the Global Labor Organization in Washington D.C. in Feb.
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TRAVIS HUMPHREY SELECTED FOR NORMAN TRANSCRIPT AND NORMAN NEXT UNDER 40 AWARD
Travis Humphrey
(2007, B.A. in Psychology) has been selected by The Norman Transcript and Norman NEXT for the 2018 Under 40 Award. The award exists to honor young professionals dedicated to making a difference in Norman. Honorees are determined based on demonstrated leadership and an interest in making Norman great. He was appointed as Bethesda’s Executive Director in June 2014.
Bethesda
provides expert care for all children in Oklahoma who have suffered the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.
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DEADLINES AND FEATURED EVENTS
Feb. 28 (est.)
Deadline for academic units to submit Faculty Evaluations to the Dean's Office.
March 1
March 2
Kaleidoscope Evening is the college's banquet, designed to honor our distinguished alumni. The event will be held at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. A reception will begin at 6 p.m., followed by dinner at 6:45 p.m. Dress is business attire.
March 9
Deadline for faculty to submit Senior Faculty Summer Fellowship proposals to Cassie Zaccarelli in the Dean's office.
March 9
Deadline for faculty to submit Junior Faculty Summer Fellowship proposals to Cassie Zaccarelli in the Dean's office.
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If you have information or announcements for
News & Updates
, please submit to the college
communication office
.
News & Updates
is published every month.
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