CONGRATULATIONS, GRADUATES!
The University of Oklahoma College of Arts and Sciences celebrated the achievements of our graduating students at ceremonies May 14-15. We appreciate all of those who attended our events and joined us online to joyfully acknowledge the work of our students. The college congratulates the Classes of 2020 and 2021. To see more photos from our ceremonies visit the college Facebook page.
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OU PRESENTS HONORARY DEGREES
OU presented honorary degrees to William G. Paul and Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe in recognition of their extraordinary achievements and generous service to others. Paul is a towering leader in the law who, as president of the American Bar Association from 1999 to 2000, advocated for increased diversity in the legal profession At OU, Paul has helped advance the mission of his alma mater through his support and investment of time, including his service as a trustee of the OU Foundation, life member and past president of the OU Alumni Association, and board member for the College of Arts and Sciences. Paul's generosity and support has made an indelible mark on the university and we sincerely appreciate his dedication to our mission. Pictured above: Dean David Wrobel joins members of the Paul family at the 2021 Honorary Degree Luncheon. READ MORE
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COLLEGE FACULTY AND STAFF AWARD WINNERS NAMED
Each year, the college honors faculty who show commitment, skill, effectiveness, impact and leadership in teaching and scholarship. In addition, the college has announced its Dean’s Staff Award winners and the Dean's Outstanding Advising Award recipients. The purpose of the awards is to recognize staff members and advisers in the departments and programs within the college for their outstanding job performance.
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Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
Kinney-Sugg Outstanding Professor Award
Established by Sandy Kinney and Mike Sugg, this award is given to an outstanding faculty member who is a model teacher and an outstanding scholar. Zhu joined the OU faculty in 2010 as an assistant professor and became an associate professor of modern Chinese literature and culture in 2016. In 2017, Zhu began serving as the acting editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed literary journal Chinese Literature Today, and she is also a contributing editor of World Literature Today. As a scholar, she explores a broad range of topics in an interdisciplinary way. Her research covers modern Chinese literature and film, women’s and gender studies, literary theory and translation. Since coming to OU, she has published one monograph (Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture, 2015), one co-edited volume (Maoist Laughter, 2019), which won ALA Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title in 2020) and 18 articles and book chapters. She has a second co-edited volume coming out in September 2021 (Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics), and she has a manuscript for a second monograph in progress (The Discourse of Labor in Modern China, 1893-1976, expected completion in 2022). She brings energy and enthusiasm to the classroom and is an inspiring teacher who encourages her students to excel. Within the department, she has served as the coordinator of the Chinese section for five years and was a Committee A member in 2018-20. She served on the CAS Support of Teaching and Research Committee and is currently co-chairing the CAS Tenure and Promotion Review Committee. At the university level, she serves on the Faculty Senate and the Research Council. While at OU, she has developed four new courses for the Chinese program (Chinese Cinema, Translating Chinese, Learning Chinese through Media, and Introduction to Chinese Myth and Folklore). In addition, she was awarded a Presidential Dream Course on Chinese Cinema in 2015.
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Department of Economics
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. In 2015, Tabrizy joined the Department of Economics, where he is an assistant professor. He teaches a mass lecture in Elements in Statistics, one of the most important undergraduate courses offered by the college. During the fall 2019 and spring 2020 semesters, this course attracted more than 900 students from different colleges. In the fall of 2020, when mass lectures were moved fully online in response to the COVID pandemic, his two sections had more than 600 students, making it the largest class offered by the department. He has also offered upper-division courses in international trade and labor economics, along with graduate courses in applied statistics for economics and finance. Tabrizy puts a great emphasis on intuition and application, which makes his class among the most interesting and popular offered by the department. His pedagogical approach has inspired many students who lack strong backgrounds in mathematics to remain invested in his course and achieve their goals. Along with his outstanding teaching record, Tabrizy has been quite successful in pursuing his research agenda, focusing on empirical analyses of international trade and finance data. He is also interested in development, innovation and growth topics. Since he joined OU, he has published six peer-reviewed articles in academic journals in his field of research. He has also presented his research in regional and international conferences.
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Department of Religious Studies
Holden Faculty Award (co-winner)
JoAnn and James Holden established this prize to be given to an outstanding faculty member who teaches courses at the freshman or sophomore level in the College of Arts and Sciences. Moodie is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies and co-chair of the Hinduism Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Her work centers on the ways that religious and economic forms co-produce one another in transnational contexts, particularly in colonial and contemporary India. In her first book, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018), she examined the ways that elite Indians transformed the in/famous Kālīghāṭ Temple into an emblem of modern Hinduism and modern India through a novel set of discourses co-produced with Britons on history, aesthetics and organizational management. In her current book project, she examines the ways that faculty and students at elite Indian business schools work alongside American management experts to infuse management practices with ideals of sacrifice, service and moral leadership—- thus making business schools critical sites for the production of religion. Moodie has published numerous articles in South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies, the Journal of Law and Religion, the International Journal of Hindu Studies and Religion Compass, as well as sites for public scholarship on religion: The Revealer and The Immanent Frame. At OU, she teaches introductory courses on Hinduism as well as religion, colonialism and nationalism in India. Her advanced seminars focus on religion and economy as well as theories and methods in the study of religion.
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Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy
Holden Faculty Award (co-winner)
JoAnn and James Holden established this prize to be given to an outstanding faculty member who teaches courses at the freshman or sophomore level in the College of Arts and Sciences. Wisniewski received his bachelor of science degree in astronomy-physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and doctoral degree in physics from the University of Toledo. He has been a faculty member at OU since 2012 and is currently a Presidential Professor and associate professor in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy. In fall 2020, he taught Physics 1114 (General Physics for Non-Science Majors) and during the spring 2021 semester he taught Astronomy 1504/1514 (Exploring the Universe). His research group studies extrasolar planets and the stars around which they form. Some members of his team use high-contrast imaging techniques to resolve young disks of gas and dust around other stars that are actively forming planets. Other team members use high-precision photometry to detect and characterize small exoplanets transiting other stars, and to characterize starspots on these planet-host stars.
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Department of Political Science
Irene Rothbaum Award
Established by Julian Rothbaum in his wife’s memory, this award annually recognizes an outstanding teacher and researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences at the assistant professor level. Ripberger received his doctorate in political science and public policy from OU in 2012 and, following a post-doctoral position at the National Weather Center, he joined the political science department in 2016, where he is an assistant professor. He is also the deputy director for research at the Center for Risk and Crisis Management and an associate director at the National Institute for Risk and Resilience. Ripberger has developed an integrated teaching and research program that is focused on weather, climate and energy policy. To do this, he has collaborated with faculty, students and research scientists in federal agencies to develop unique data streams in the form of annual surveys and social media content. He applies a range of “big data” analytical techniques to study public perceptions of the threats posed by climate change and severe weather. Much of his work is focused on the behavioral and public policy responses to those threats. The result has been an extraordinarily productive research program, in which he has been PI or co-PI on multiple research grants and contracts, and he has published nearly 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His teaching contribution rivals that of his research as he teaches the introductory and intermediate quantitative research methods sequence for Ph.D. students. These courses provide students with a foundation in and ability to apply quantitative methods that are commonly used in the social sciences.
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Department of Sociology
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 holds the rank of assistant professor or higher and exhibits a scholarly and thoughtful approach to innovative thinking. Carl began teaching in the Department of Sociology in 1998 as a graduate student, and then later as an adjunct professor, while working as a professor at another university. In 2014, he became an assistant professor in the department and in 2019 he was named an associate professor. Since coming to OU, he has published two textbooks and coauthored a monograph, A Country Called Prison (2015, Oxford University Press). His research areas include criminology and the U.S. prison system. He is a passionate teacher of Sociology 1113 (Introduction to Sociology), which is the backbone of recruitment for sociology majors. He also mentors graduate students to teach through the Graduate Teaching Seminar within his department. He has enriched the student experience by serving as both advisor to the Sociology/Criminology Club and the current chair of the Undergraduate Program Committee. Perhaps most impactful is Carl’s stewardship of the OU Inside-Out Program at Mabel Bassett, a state women’s prison, in McLoud. Each week he takes OU students inside the prison to take a course related to drugs, alcohol and incarceration with inmates at that facility. OU is one of the few places in the country offering this type of educational experience with incarcerated women. With one in 100 women in Oklahoma incarcerated, this program is a testament to OU’s commitment to educating the people in our state.
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JANIE ADKINS – DEAN'S STAFF AWARD
Adkins joined the history department in 2014 and has become an indispensable asset. Her primary responsibility is to manage the graduate program. In addition, she assists the department chair in a wide variety of other important tasks. The department has roughly 70 full-time graduate students, so this is a formidable responsibility. She manages the department admissions process and keeps close track of students’ progress through their degree program. She has done this with maximum efficiency, and she maintains a remarkably warm and caring relationship with each of the graduate students.
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MIKE DONLON – DEAN'S STAFF AWARD
Donlon came to the math department in October of 2018. He immediately made the office more efficient by scanning hundreds of documents stored in paper form to create a well-organized and searchable database for departmental documents. He also played a crucial role in the abrupt transition to online instruction in spring 2020. While instructors were busy redesigning their classes and preparing materials for online classes, he drove his car for days to deliver necessary equipment to instructors at their homes.
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BRENDA MACKEY – DEAN'S STAFF AWARD
Mackey began working in the English department in 2015 and serves as the assistant to the chair. She was nominated for her remarkable service for all the years she has been at OU. In 2019, she took on duties well outside her workflow to help the department succeed during a transition of department chairs. For the two years leading up to 2019 she absorbed much of the work of three staff members, including taking on support of graduate education. She is remarkable at identifying department functions that need attention and has been instrumental in the budget process and preparing the department budget shell. Finally, when the last year brought tragedy to the department due to the pandemic, it was Mackey who acted as a kind, stable presence in the midst of the storm.
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GEORGE MARTIN – DEAN'S STAFF AWARD
Martin serves as the facilities manager for all 10 of the buildings and spaces under the control of the biology department. During the winter storm in February, Martin worked over 16 hours a day and was instrumental in minimizing the loss across these facilities. All of the biology buildings and the ARF house research animals, critical laboratory infrastructure and storage of priceless and irrecoverable research samples. The prolonged subzero temperatures, snowfall and power outages during this storm posed a threat to these research animals, equipment and samples. Were it not for his heroic efforts, the department would have suffered staggering losses in all these areas.
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CALLIE CRAIG – DEAN'S OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC ADVISING AWARD
Craig is an exemplary employee who excels not only in the fulfillment of all of her responsibilities, but in her advocacy for and care of our English majors. She has worked to organize the Professional Development Workshop put on each year by the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Academic Advising. In a volunteer role, Craig has participated in training other advisors and supporting the event in other ways. She has also served on PACAA’s Diversity Enrichment Council, helping to organize and coordinate diversity, equity and inclusion learning opportunities for the entire advising community. She also helped organize The English Club, an undergraduate group for English majors, and she has been instrumental in restarting the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society chapter. In fall 2021, students will benefit from the new scheduling system that Craig and professor Kimberly Wieser have devised that ensures that students know what the department will be offering every three years.
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JEN DUBOIS – DEAN'S OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC ADVISING AWARD
For the past three and a half years, Dubois been an incredible asset to the faculty and staff of the Department of Psychology, where she is the lead academic counselor. The department is one of the largest at OU and during the fall 2020 semester she carried a load of 440 advisees. One example of her commitment came during the winter storm that hit Oklahoma this semester that created power outages for many while they were working from home. Dubois went the extra mile to obtain a generator to ensure she could continue to work for her students as their enrollment windows were opening. A leader on campus, she took on the role of instructor for both the Gateway course for incoming freshmen and the career exploration course for the psychology department. Dubois balanced all of this while focusing on her own professional development as she completed her master’s degree in May 2020.
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FACULTY AND STAFF HONORED BY UNIVERSITY
Each year, OU celebrates the great achievements of its talented faculty through a variety of awards and recognitions. The Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost coordinates awards with other administrative offices, including the Office of the Vice President for Research, University College, Student Government Association, College of International Studies, and the Sooner Engineering Education Center. It was an outstanding year for the College of Arts and Sciences at the 2021 Faculty Tribute. In addition, OU and the Staff Senate on the Norman campus recognize dedicated and outstanding staff members through a variety of awards for outstanding performance, service anniversaries and retirements. The college congratulates all of our 2021 faculty and staff award recipients. Thank you for your commitment to serving our university's purpose and contributing to the growth of the OU Family. Pictured above is Heather Todd, executive director of operations for the OU College of Arts and Sciences, who was honored with the Jennifer L. Wise Good Stewardship Award.
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KALEIDOSCOPE EVENING UPDATE
Due to COVID-19, the college has postponed the 2021 Kaleidoscope Evening, our annual banquet designed to celebrate the college and honor our distinguished alumni. We are working to reschedule the event for the fall and details will be announced at a later date. For questions about Kaleidoscope Evening, contact Cassie Jansing, director of development.
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THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT
Throughout the academic year, the college shared the stories of Ania and Aubrie, two of our current students who have continued to pursue their degrees, thanks to the generosity of those who provided scholarship support. Thanks to the hundreds of donors who contributed, we were able to award scholarships to 50% more students than last year. The generosity of supporters has removed obstacles and created meaningful opportunities for bright minds at the OU College of Arts and Sciences. More students like Ania and Aubrie will be able to continue their OU journey – find out how much the support means to them.
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FACULTY AND DEPARTMENT NEWS |
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Amanda Cobb-Greetham (Chickasaw), a professor of Native American Studies in the University of Oklahoma College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a 2021–2022 fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, joining an extraordinary group of artists, scientists, scholars and practitioners who will learn from and inspire one another in a year of discovery and interdisciplinary exchange. As a 2021-2022 Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Cobb-Greetham will pursue an individual project in a community dedicated to exploration and inquiry. Cobb-Greetham’s project, Bright, Golden Haze: Oklahoma/Indian Identity in Myth and Memory, a collection of interrelated essays, will interrogate Oklahoma/Indian myth and memory. READ MORE
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Thirumalai “Venky” Venkatesan, director of the Center for Quantum Research and Technology at the University of Oklahoma, is one of 60 outstanding scientists from across the globe selected to join the Royal Society as a fellow. The distinguished group of scientists consists of 52 Fellows, 10 Foreign Members and one Honorary Fellow and were all selected for their exceptional contributions to science. They join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Dorothy Hodgkin who all enriched the society with their expertise. READ MORE
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Luca Fornelli, assistant professor of biology and chemistry, is one of three recipients of this year’s prestigious American Society for Mass Spectrometry Research Award. Fornelli will receive the $35,000 award at the next ASMS annual conference, to be held Oct. 21-Nov. 4 in Philadelphia. The association presents the awards to promote the research of academic scientists within the first four years of joining the tenure track or research faculty of a North American university. The other two 2021 recipients serve on the faculties of Yale University and Texas A&M University. Fornelli’s research focuses on the study of the proteins present in an organism, or proteomics, using high-resolution mass spectrometry. He specializes in the “top-down” approach that is aimed at characterizing intact protein forms, or proteoforms. He earned his bachelor and master of science degrees from the University of Padova, Italy, and his doctorate from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. READ MORE
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Karin Schutjer, professor of German Studies, has been appointed as a co-editor of The German Quarterly by the AATG Board of Directors. Hester Baer, University of Maryland, was also named co-editor. Before Maryland, Baer taught German and Women’s and Gender Studies at OU. Professors Schutjer and Baer are well-established scholars with outstanding publishing records, as well as administrative and editorial experience. Together they bring documented expertise in historical periods ranging from late 18th century to contemporary, across media, approaches (methods and theory), and across disciplines, including Jewish Studies. Both professors Baer and Schutjer hold academic appointments (comparative literature, international studies) that signal their interdisciplinarity nature and their ability to connect their disciplinary training and research to global issues. Schutjer has served as the editor of the book series New Studies in the Age of Goethe at Bucknell. Their DEI statement impressed the search committee, because the innovative proposals they make for their co-editorship flow from the principles of inclusion, accessibility, diversity and equity outlined in it.
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Congratulations to Carolina Rueda, associate professor of film and media studies, who was recognized at Worldfest Houston with a Special Jury Remi Award for her film Oklahoma Mon Amour. The film portrays a ruptured family and the quest for its reunion, the journey of two brothers, the challenges faced by multicultural youth needing to find their true identity and to unveil buried secrets, all of this tinted by the puzzling closeness between Mexico and the United States.
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Professor Emeritus of History David Levy's Breaking Down Barriers: George McLaurin and the Struggle to End Segregated Education (OU Press 2020) has been recognized as the Best Non-fiction Book at the Oklahoma Book Awards. For more than 30 years, the Oklahoma Center for the Book has given awards for works written by an Oklahoman or about Oklahoma. Levy provides a succinct, detailed account of McLaurin’s fight to become the first African American to attend the OU School of Education as a graduate student in October 1948.
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Stephen Weldon, associate professor in the Department of History science, technology and medicine, has published The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism (Johns Hopkins University Press). The book explores the intellectual and cultural shifts in 20th-century America related to science and religion. It charts the fate of the humanist movement, a group of American intellectuals and activists who placed science at the center of their worldview and who repudiated God and the supernatural. For the humanists – including many prominent philosophers, scientists and public intellectuals – modern science offered them intellectual as well as ethical and, at times, even spiritual sustenance.
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Lucas Bessire, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, published Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press, 2021). The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face-to-face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss and what it means to find your way back home.
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The OU Spanish master’s degree program was recently ranked No. 4 in the nation by Best Value Schools. Best Value Schools is a website dedicated to helping prospective students find the best possible college or university for their needs. OU offers an M.A. in Spanish through the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. The program prepares students to become fluent readers, writers and speakers of Spanish who can pursue careers as educators of the language or go on to pursue a Ph.D. in Spanish.
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STAFF SPOTLIGHT: MEET ANJANETTE PIERCE
Anjanette Pierce is the director of payroll for the OU College of Arts and Sciences. In her position, she oversees payroll and Workforce for all faculty and staff in the college and manages new faculty recruitment and budgets for the 650+ permanent faculty positions within the college. In addition, Pierce is currently the Organizational Staff Council’s vice president/president elect.
Pierce has been with the university 14 years and her favorite part of her job has always been watching her fellow peers progress, as well as the opportunity to mentor and develop staff and students into leaders. She believes that as a member of the OU community it is her duty to include everyone. Pierce also gives credit to her assistant, Meagan Bray, for their payroll team’s success, noting she “couldn’t do what I do without her.”
Most recently, Pierce has been a driving force for the college in OU’s Compass Project, which is leading the university through the transition to a new integrated Enterprise Resource Planning system to serve all campuses.
The implementation began in October 2019, the Financials PeopleSoft system went live in July of 2020 and the HR PeopleSoft system went live in January 2021. For Pierce, the HR PeopleSoft system implementation was the most time-consuming step and she dedicated her 2020 winter break to learning, mastering, teaching and testing the new system.
Pierce spent every day of her winter break, besides Christmas, on Zoom calls with departmental staff members. She used different types of learning styles and spent individual time walking her peers through the system. Simultaneously, Pierce was teaching herself every inch of the system. She was an on-campus tester for the HR PeopleSoft system, tasked with ensuring that the system would function correctly.
“The new system was set to launch on January 1 and there was no room for the system to not work,” said Pierce. “My colleagues and I would joke that I was actually trying to break the system. I was trying to figure out everything that could possibly go wrong and how we could fix it.”
The third step of the implementation is taking place currently as the university implements a new budget system, Workday Adaptive Planning. These new systems will make the university and college more efficient and enable leaders to have more insight into finances, workforce and budget.
Although a challenge Pierce could not have predicted, she’s found working from home during this endeavor to be a blessing in disguise. “I’m an introvert and a numbers cruncher,” said Pierce. “By working from home, I have less distractions and my productivity has gone way up. I’ve found a way to overcome every obstacle thrown at me.”
This spring when the college launched a comprehensive strategic planning process, Pierce was asked to serve as a member of the working group. Pierce recently obtained her Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification from the Gallogly College of Engineering, which will help her further serve the college in our strategic planning goals. The effort will help the college set clear strategic initiatives, above and beyond regular operations, that both support OU’s Lead On, University strategic plan for the Norman campus and prepare the college to succeed in a rapidly changing landscape.
"Anjanette Pierce is an extremely valued and detail-oriented employee," said Kelvin White, associate dean for faculty development and community. "She goes beyond the normal work requirements, takes great initiative to train others, to develop leaders, and to find ways to improve our processes to be more efficient."
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Carson Ball has been awarded a Fulbright grant to learn and teach abroad for the 2021-2022 academic year. Ball is among more than 1,900 U.S. students, artists and early career professionals who were offered Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English and conduct research in over 140 countries throughout the world. Fulbright grant recipients are selected on the basis of academic excellence and achievement, as well as their leadership potential in their respective fields. Ball graduated from OU this month with a bachelor’s degree in political science and Native American studies. He will spend his Fulbright year at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, completing a master’s degree in political science. After graduate school, he plans to pursue a career in nonprofits, government arts agencies or tribal serving institutions. He is also a Carl Albert Center undergraduate research fellow. READ MORE
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The college congratulates our students who have been elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Founded at the College of William and Mary, Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honor society, recognizes undergraduate achievement across the liberal arts disciplines: the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, languages and mathematics. Students eligible for membership in the society must graduate in the top 10% of their class and demonstrate superior academic performance across the spectrum of the liberal arts. The college also congratulates this year’s honorary member, professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers of the Department of English. Professor Jeffers was elected in recognition of her outstanding accomplishments in and advancement of the liberal arts and sciences inside and outside of the classroom.
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Mehrnaz Afkhami مهرناز افخمی, a doctoral biology student at the University of Oklahoma, was awarded the graduate student poster award at this year’s 62nd Annual Drosophila Research Conference. She was selected for this honor among hundreds of posters, beating out the two runners-up from Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University. The conference was held as part of the international meeting (known as the Fly meeting) of the Genetics Society of America, which serves as one of the premier research conferences for geneticists who use fruit flies for their research. READ MORE
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Congratulations to Noah Coen, a linguistics and Russian major, who was selected to receive a prestigious 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The five-year grant is for graduate study at a U.S. academic institution. Coen plans to pursue a Ph.D. in linguistics at UCLA and his goal is to become a professor of linguistics. |
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$30,000 — HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA: MEANINGFUL EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVE AND INCLUSIVE TEACHING
The team, which includes the members of the OU Teaching Evaluation Working Group, received an HHMI Inclusive Excellence (Phase 3) award that places OU in a Learning Community with teams from 13 other colleges and universities. Each team is addressing their current system of teaching evaluation, addressing the challenge of “meaningful evaluation of effective and inclusive teaching, which will inform faculty practices, including promotion and tenure decisions.” The team will share ideas and resources as they develop policies and tools to recognize and reward inclusive teaching practices and to bring teaching evaluation more in alignment with our values as a university. The TEWG team at OU has been working on teaching evaluation tools for two years, and is currently running a large-scale pilot of the Student Experience Survey in spring 2021. They will be working with pilot departments to incorporate the Student Experience Survey into their annual evaluation practices.
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$459,692.08 — U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
ASSESS THE IMPACT OF THE NATIONALLY INSTITUTED NUTRITION LABELLING POLICY ON THE NUTRITIONAL QUALITY OF FOOD OFFERED IN U.S. RESTAURANTS
In 2018, a policy of nutritional labeling on restaurant menus was enacted nationally in the United States for restaurant chains with 20 or more locations. This award supports research to investigate the impact of the policy on the nutritional quality of food offered in U.S. restaurants. Researchers collected a large panel data consisting of the nutritional information of all menu items for various large and small (as comparison) restaurant chains. They will examine how the nutrition labeling policy affects menu offerings, nutritional profile, advertising and sales at national chain restaurants, including how different types of restaurants may react differently to the policy. The project will determine the extent to which restaurants’ response to the labeling rule bolster or hinder the overall objective of reducing the obesity rate in the United States. Liu is working with Emily Wang (PI, UMass-Amherst) and Nathalie Lavoie (Co-PI, UMass-Amherst) on this project.
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Researchers Cecil Lewis and Tanvi Honap have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant (NSF BCS-2045308) for their project “CHOMPER: Calculus and Hominid Oral Metagenomes for Pathogen Evolution Research.” Oral diseases, such as dental caries and periodontitis, affect nearly 3.5 billion people worldwide, and are often referred to as the silent epidemic. These diseases are caused by bacteria found in the normal oral cavity and can cause disease in an opportunistic manner. The core aims of the CHOMPER project are to study how the genomes of these oral disease-causing bacteria differ depending on host species, geographic location and dietary lifestyle, as well as how these genomes have evolved over time. The CHOMPER team has collected dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) samples from nonhuman primates, such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, housed in museums in the United States., and from archaeological human remains from archaeological sites in the Americas and Africa. These ancient human populations span a period of nearly 10,000 years and encompass the transition of humans from a forager to agricultural lifestyle. Using cutting-edge ancient DNA techniques, the team will reconstruct the genomes of oral pathogens from the dental calculus samples to answer questions regarding strain diversity, biogeography, genome structure and the presence of genes associated with virulence and antibiotic resistance. The CHOMPER project has been developed in close collaboration with the descendent communities of the ancient human populations being studied, which include the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe in the United SttesMayan communities in Belize, and communities in Sudan. In addition to informing us regarding the evolution of oral pathogens, CHOMPER aims to encourage positive oral health outcomes, especially in these Descendent communities, through public presentations focused on the impact of oral disease and the role of the microbiome in oral health. Pictured above are members of the CHOMPER team: Tanvi Honap, Cecil Lewis, Cara Monroe and Marc Levine (University of Oklahoma); Anne Stone and Brenda Baker (Arizona State University); Andrew Ozga (Nova Southeastern University); and Keith Prufer (University of New Mexico). READ MORE
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Associate Dean for Research Georgia Kosmopoulou’s research on network analysis with applications in industrial organization has led to three new publications in the Journal of Industrial Economics, Economic Inquiry and Oxford Economics Papers. The topics vary from competition in the airline industry to public procurement auctions and art auctions. The study of art auctions identifies factors contributing to price fluctuations in artwork after an artist’s death. With access to information on seller characteristics from a historical dataset of all art auctions that took place in London between 1741 and 1913, Kosmopoulou worked with her graduate student, Robert Press, and professors Rachel Pawnall from Maastricht University and Dakshina Desilva from the University of Lancaster to investigate how trading patterns and network effects affect art sales prices. Her current NSF-funded work with her graduate student, Kasra Khademorezaian, and OU researchers from psychology and MIS addresses technology use to facilitate social distancing and coping with the disruption of COVID-19. The project investigates how technology helps to cope with the stresses of social distancing during the pandemic and contributes insights about the impact of work adaptation enabled by technology on economic vulnerability and resilience.
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An international team led by Xiangming Xiao (pictured right), George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, published a paper in the April issue of the journal Nature Climate Change that has major implications on forest policies, conservation and management practices in the Brazilian Amazon. Xiao is also the director of OU’s Center for Earth Observation and Modeling. Yuanwei Qin (pictured left), a research scientist at the Center for Earth Observation and Modeling at OU, is the lead author of the study. READ MORE
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NATHAN KAIB – HOMER L. DODGE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY
$101,000 — NASA HEADQUARTERS
EW STEP 2: UNDERSTANDING THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRIMORDIAL KUIPER BELT DURING THE SOLAR SYSTEM'S EARLY YEARS
The research group is using computer simulations of planetary orbits to model the formation and evolution of our solar system. This grant focuses on binary objects contained in the Kuiper belt, a belt of icy objects beyond Neptune, and what the existence and evolution of this particular set of objects tells us about their past interactions with the planets as well as how the properties of the Kuiper belt have changed over time.
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Kevin Kuruc and Jonathan McFadden, assistant professors in economics, recently published their research in Nature Food. Their paper, “Animal-based foods have high social and climate costs,” uses a macroeconomic-climate framework to couple global agricultural and industrial economies to estimate these costs at a regional level. Despite the importance of animal-based agricultural greenhouse gas emissions as drivers of climate change, the climate costs of such emissions have not yet been quantified in an integrated way. Their analysis revealed geographic heterogeneity in climate costs by diet and food type, suggesting opportunities for mitigation policies while recognizing food insecurity risks. Apart from publishing the paper, McFadden also recently was awarded funding from the OECD and USDA. Kuruc was asked to spend the summer working at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.
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May 25
Chairs and Directors meeting, 9 a.m.
May 26
CASFAM Staff meeting, 10 a.m.
June 19 (est.)
Deadline to enter fall 2022 OTIS into the Teaching Load and Course Enrollment Management System.
July 15
Sabbatical leave applications for spring 2022 or spring 2022 and fall 2022 (two-semester sabbatical) are due to the Dean’s office.
Aug. 23
2021 fall semester classes begin.
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