presidential awards for faculty excellence

Announcing the recipients of the 2024 Presidential Faculty Excellence Awards

Melanie Balog — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:58:04 +0000

Announcing the recipients of the 2024 Presidential Faculty Excellence Awards Melanie Balog Fri, 04/12/2024 - 14:58

��AV President Gregory Washington has announced the recipients of the 2024 Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence, honoring 13 Mason faculty members for their work on behalf of the university, students, and the broader community.

This is the eighth year for the Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence, selected by a review committee that includes prior award recipients and senior leaders from relevant areas. Recipients will be honored at a reception May 7.

The awards honor faculty with up to six years of service, six to 12 years of service, and more than 12 years of service.

“��AV faculty are at the forefront of their fields and their work is an overarching reason why Mason is considered one of the country’s top 50 public universities,” Mason President Gregory Washington said. “We take great pride in honoring our faculty for their transcendent work and impact in teaching, research, social impact, and diversity and inclusion here at the largest public research university in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

The John Toups Presidential Medal for Excellence in Teaching is presented to a faculty member whose teaching inspires and stimulates students in the finest tradition of higher education.

The Beck Family Presidential Medal for Excellence in Research recognizes extraordinary contributions by members of the Mason faculty to consequential research of high impact. The award is presented annually to a Mason faculty member whose research represents groundbreaking advances in their field.

The United Bank Presidential Medal for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion recognizes extraordinary contributions in teaching, research, scholarship, creative works, or service that directly advances diversity and inclusion inside and outside the Mason community.

The Earle C. Williams Presidential Medal for Excellence in Social Impact is presented to a faculty member in any discipline who makes extraordinary efforts to use their scholarship to solve real-world problems.

The complete list of 2024 honorees is below. See prior recipients for 2017 to 2023.

Faculty Excellence in Teaching

Dominic White is an instructional assistant professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences in the College of Science. A computational paleontologist, White joined the Mason faculty in 2019 and serves as the course coordinator for CDS 101 and 102 Introduction to Computational and Data Sciences, a Mason Core course in the natural sciences. As course coordinator, he leads and supports a team of 15 faculty and teaching assistants who teach the course.

White has led a number of successful pedagogical experiments that have changed his approach to the introductory course. In particular, he has taken advantage of the capabilities of online learning platforms to make the course more interactive to encourage student engagement. Enrollments for the course have tripled in the four years White has been teaching it.

White also developed an innovative course, CDS 490 Data Science in Practice, in which undergraduate students worked with the U.S. Census Bureau on semester-long projects using census data, which they then presented at a Census Bureau conference.

Rachel Lewis is an instructional associate professor in Women and Gender Studies and director of undergraduate and graduate programs. She joined the faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) in 2012.

Lewis has taken an outsized role in curricular development for the Women and Gender Studies Program and has designed and taught 17 different courses over the past 10 years. Given the small number of program faculty members, her initiative has been crucial to the program’s ability to offer a wide array of courses. Lewis’s courses are interdisciplinary and transnational in scope, focusing on issues relating to sexuality, race, immigration, human and animal rights, ecology, and disability.

Lewis is extraordinarily active as a mentor to both graduate and undergraduate students. She has chaired 25 master’s degree student committees in five different programs and has served on the committees for nearly 30 more students at either the master’s degree or doctoral level. Lewis plays a central role in graduate mentorship across many humanities and social science fields, particularly for students whose research relates to issues of gender and sexuality.

Lisa Gring-Pemble an associate professor in the Costello College of Business, is the recipient of The John Toups Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Teaching. Her teaching fields include innovation and entrepreneurship, rhetoric, political communication, and public policy.

Every semester, Gring-Pemble meets with each of her students individually, building various in-term assessments and check-ins into her courses so that she can monitor their engagement and adapt accordingly, and guides each student toward their goals. She also creates new learning opportunities for her students, usually in the form of experiential learning. She has taken her students to New Hampshire to meet presidential candidates and observe the electoral process in person, organized study-abroad trips, and brought students with her to sit in on congressional debates and U.S. Supreme Court hearings.

Gring-Pemble’s innovative contributions often serve Mason’s goals of sustainability and inclusive excellence. She was cofounder of Mason’s Honey Bee Initiative and the founding co-executive director of the Business for a Better World Center. She is a board member of the Institute for a Sustainable Earth and serves on the advisory board of UndocuMason.

In 2020, Gring-Pemble codeveloped the Impact Fellows Program, a two-year cohort-based program for first-time, first-year students from groups underrepresented in the business world.

Faculty Excellence in Research

Antonios Anastasopoulos is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computing. His research is in the field of natural language processing, which seeks to enable computers to understand text and spoken words.

Anastasopoulos has led projects that aim to make language technologies work for populations that are underserved by currently available tools—for example, by enabling computers to handle input from non-native language speakers or nonstandard dialects. He also has led interdisciplinary projects with humanists that seek to document endangered languages. He has, for example, developed tools that can perform optical character recognition on endangered languages so that currently inaccessible texts will be made available for scholarly analysis.

Since joining Mason in 2020, his publications have been cited more than 2,700 times. The interdisciplinary nature of his research is reflected in the diverse range of grants he has received, from the National Science Foundation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, Google, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), the Virginia Research Investment Fund, and the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative.

Rémi Veneziano is an assistant professor in Department of Bioengineering, having joined the College of Engineering and Computing in 2018. Much of his research has been in DNA origami, which involves the folding of DNA to create 2D and 3D objects at nanoscale, thus enabling the construction of functional nanomaterials. Veneziano has also led the effort to apply this research to the creation of new technologies. In recognition of his innovative approaches, he received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Trailblazer Award.

Veneziano has 10 patents or patent applications, including one that has been licensed, and he received seed funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation to start a new venture to commercialize technologies developed from his research. He has published his research widely, with 32 refereed publications, including one in the prestigious journal Science. His research has been supported by eight grants, from agencies such as NSF, National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Lincoln Mullen is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He joined the Mason faculty in 2014.

As a historian of American religion and the 19th-century United States, his first book, The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America, published by Harvard University Press in 2017, won a Best Book prize from the American Academy of Religion. His second major project in this field was America’s Public Bible, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. This interactive scholarly work uncovers the history of the Bible in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States using computational methods.

Mullen is also executive director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media[PAW4] , the oldest and largest digital humanities center in the country. He has directed nine major collaborative digital projects and created several new software tools to examine or visualize historical datasets. One example is Mapping Early American Elections, which turned electoral returns from the first several decades of U.S. history into a dataset that could be analyzed and mapped using data visualization tools.

Rainald Löhner, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Science and director of the Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics, is the recipient of The Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research.

He has been a pioneer in developing computational models for solving fluid flow problems. His algorithms and techniques have been applied to solve such challenges as air and underwater explosions, ship and submarine hydrodynamics, hemodynamics of vascular diseases, contaminant and pathogen transport, and pedestrian movement and crowd control. Löhner’s recent efforts to apply his work in computational fluid dynamics to the problem of COVID-19 transport received national attention from major media outlets.

Löhner has nearly 900 research publications, including around 200 peer-reviewed articles in journals from a variety of disciplines. He is also the author of a textbook on applied computational fluid dynamics.

Löhner has given more than 150 invited talks, many of them abroad, and serves on the editorial board of six international journals. He has secured grants from several major organizations, including NASA, NSF, NIH, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In 2023, he was recognized by Stanford University as one of the world's top 2% of scientists.

Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion

Gabrielle Tayac is an associate professor and public historian who joined the faculty in the Department of History and Art History in CHSS in 2020. Prior to that, she served as an educator, historian, and curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where she became a leading figure in the development of community curation, a new inclusive methodology for studying and representing the history of underrepresented groups. This methodology combines archival research with oral history and other forms of community engagement.

Tayac has created six new courses that teach community-engaged public history methods to undergraduate and graduate students. In each course, she builds in experiential learning opportunities in which her students interact with knowledge holders from the marginalized communities whose history they are studying.

With funding from the Virginia Humanities Foundation, Tayac led doctoral students in an oral history project with Barrios Unidos, a grassroots anti-violence organization in Northern Virginia that developed Indigenous cultural practices as a healing modality for gang-involved youth.

Kelly Knight joined the Department of Forensic Science in 2013 as an instructional associate professor in the College of Science. Prior to Mason, she worked as a forensic scientist, first as a research associate and laboratory manager, and then as a forensic DNA analyst for several years with the Maryland State Police’s Forensic Sciences Division.

In 2019, Knight led the effort to create the first forensic DNA laboratory on campus, where she is the principal investigator, in part based on the goal of providing hands-on learning to erase gender and ethnic gaps in STEM degree achievement. In 2021, she participated in an NSF-funded eight-week course called the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project. She and two other Mason faculty members completed the facilitator workshop training necessary to lead a group of Mason STEM faculty through the same course.

Knight also serves as the faculty advisor for several student groups, including the Women of Color in STEM. More than a decade ago, she cofounded the Females of Color and those Underrepresented in STEM (FOCUS) middle school camp and the FOCUS High School Academy.

Xiaomei Cai, associate chair and associate professor in the Department of Communication in CHSS, is the recipient of The United Bank Presidential Medal for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion. At Mason since 2006, her research and scholarship focus on the well-being of vulnerable populations, especially with respect to children’s privacy on the internet and health prevention among adolescents.

Cai’s leadership of inclusive excellence causes was motivated, in part, by the surge of anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cai played a lead role in developing the CHSS Network, a faculty mentoring program that reaches all faculty but was created in part to ensure that underrepresented faculty members receive adequate guidance and support.

Cai has also been instrumental in the development of the college’s inclusive faculty search protocol, which resulted in a significant increase in the number of minoritized faculty at the college, as well as in the number of faculty whose scholarly expertise and research reflects broader, more diverse interests. Within the Department of Communication, she has aligned the departmental goals with college-wide inclusive excellence efforts.

Cai has recently taken on the program coordinator role for the Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Affinity Group . She has partnered with organizations such as the Chinese American Parents Association of Northern Virginia to advance justice-related causes.

Faculty Excellence in Social Impact

Melissa Ainsworth is an instructional assistant professor in the field of special education in the College of Education and Human Development. She taught K-12 students with severe disabilities in Fairfax County Public Schools for many years and she continued to do so while earning her doctorate at Mason in 2014 and teaching part-time at the university level. She began her full-time faculty appointment in 2019.

Ainsworth’s social impact is evidenced through her deep commitment to her students, who are themselves teachers in the field of special education, and how she provides guidance and support for teachers of students with severe disabilities. Motivated by her own research findings that such teachers often feel isolated within their schools and experience high levels of burnout and turnover, she has created a community of practice group, REFLECT GMU, for Mason alumni who teach students with severe disabilities. She has also formed an online community, KEEP GMU, that serves as a discussion group and resource repository for program alumni who work with students with severe disabilities.

Eunmee Lee joined Mason as a full-time faculty member for the INTO Mason program in 2015. In 2016, she joined the faculty at Mason Korea, where she is currently an instructional associate professor and teaches English for academic purposes[PAW8] . Lee is also the founder and director of Mason Korea’s Academic Resource Center.

Lee has led two major initiatives that have had a substantial impact upon the Incheon community and its relationship with Mason and other universities located at Incheon Global Campus. The first is Korea’s Citizen Life College, a program that offers Incheon citizens free, noncredit lifelong learning courses taught mostly by Mason Korea faculty. The program is designed to reach the people of “Old Incheon,” a mainly working-class community. The program provides access to a Mason education to people who could not otherwise afford it.

Lee has also led a project to support Incheon’s K-12 school system by creating programs for Mason Korea students and faculty to teach and mentor local middle and high school students. She has also organized in-service training programs for K-12 schools and teachers in the city.

Shane Caswell, professor of athletic training in the School of Kinesiology in CEHD and founding director of the Sports Medicine Assessment Research and Testing Laboratory, is the recipient of The Earle C. Williams Presidential Medal for Excellence in Social Impact. Caswell focuses on the practical implementation of research around critical health care and safety initiatives, particularly around brain health and concussion management. Since joining the Mason faculty, he has used his research findings to improve the health of student-athletes in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Over a decade ago, Caswell created the ACHIEVES Project, which stands for AdvanCing Healthcare Initiatives for undErserVEd Students to improve concussion education, diagnosis, and management within Prince William County Public Schools. The project has added new dimensions over the years, including increasing the number of athletic trainers in middle schools and preparing them to diagnose and treat concussions on site.

The Virginia Concussion Initiative (VCI) brought together health care providers, school personnel, and researchers to develop electronic resources relating to concussions for schools and parents, including the Neurodiversity Toolkit, which provides guidance about how to address the unique needs of neurodivergent individuals during concussion care. It has been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control as the first toolkit nationally and internationally to address the needs of this specific population.

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Strategic Direction

Announcing the recipients of the 2023 Presidential Faculty Excellence Awards

Melanie Balog — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 18:00:36 +0000

Announcing the recipients of the 2023 Presidential Faculty Excellence Awards Melanie Balog Tue, 04/18/2023 - 14:00

��AV President Gregory Washington has announced the recipients of the 2023 Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence, honoring 12 Mason faculty members for their work on behalf of the university, students, and the broader community.

This is the seventh year for the Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence, selected by a review committee that includes prior award winners and university senior leaders. Recipients will be honored at a reception May 11.

The awards honor faculty with up to six years of service, six to 12 years of service, and more than 12 years of service.

“Our faculty continue to make extraordinary contributions in all fields and at all levels,” Mason President Gregory Washington said. “The awards are a way to honor faculty for their outstanding work in teaching, research, scholarship, social impact, and diversity and inclusion. The honorees exemplify the caliber of faculty we have here at the largest and most diverse public university in Virginia.”

The John Toups Presidential Medal for Excellence in Teaching is presented to a faculty member whose teaching inspires and stimulates students in the finest tradition of higher education.

The United Bank Presidential Medal for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion recognizes extraordinary contributions in teaching, research, scholarship, creative works or service that directly advances diversity and inclusion inside and outside the Mason community.

The complete list of 2023 honorees is below. See prior recipients for 2017-2022.

Faculty Excellence in Teaching

Evmenova

The John Toups Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Teaching:

Anya S. Evmenova is a professor in the Division of Special Education and disAbility Research in the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). She specializes in accessible instruction methods grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with application in face-to-face, hybrid, and online environments.

Evmenova is an exceptionally prolific advisor to doctoral students and has gone to great lengths to involve graduate students in her research projects and publications. She has also raised more than $14 million in federal grants to support her research, which focuses on the use of assistive technology in the instruction and cognitive development of diverse learners. Her research projects include professional development opportunities for teachers, caregivers, students, or individuals with disabilities to enhance their use of technology.

Evmenova has conducted workshops for teachers in numerous countries to transform their inclusive education practices for students with disabilities. At Mason, she has helped develop and conduct the Online Teaching Initiative to prepare CEHD faculty for effective online teaching. She serves as one of CEHD’s coordinators of digital learning and the associate director for the Global Online Teacher Education Center. She has received the Teaching Excellence Award for Technology-Enhanced Teaching (2016) and the inaugural Online Teaching Excellence Award (2018).

Lewis

Gwendolyn (Wendy) Lewis is an instructional associate professor in the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience (IPN) in the College of Science. Lewis joined IPN when it was created in 2016 and was the first teaching-focused faculty member dedicated solely to the program. She has served as the undergraduate coordinator for IPN since 2018, overseeing the program’s growth and expansion and playing a lead role in the development of the program’s curriculum.

Lewis has helped position the neuroscience program as a leader in innovative course design by promoting the development of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). In Lewis’s research course, the Zebrafish Neurodevelopment Laboratory, students design and carry out novel research projects to investigate the nervous system in zebrafish and present their work at internal and external symposiums. Through this course, which is part of the Mason Impact+ program and Research and Scholarship Intensive, Lewis has increased the access and availability of undergraduate research experiences, mentoring more than 100 students on dozens of research projects since 2017.

Wooten

Courtney Adams Wooten is associate chair for writing program administration and an assistant professor in the English Department in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS). She joined Mason in 2018 and regularly teaches general education composition courses as well as graduate courses in composition pedagogy.

Wooten has worked on projects such as a linguistic justice and contract grading working groups. She has also collaborated with other faculty members on various projects that received two Mason Curriculum Impact Grants, a Stearns Center Anti-Racist and Inclusive Teaching (ARIT) Grant, and a national Conference on College Composition and Communication Research Initiative Grant.

Wooten served on the Council of Writing Program Administrators Executive Board, and has edited many books and collections, in addition to publishing articles and book chapters about writing program administration and writing pedagogy. She has also served on the Mason Core Committee and the Faculty Senate Task Force on Reimagining Faculty Roles and Rewards.

Faculty Excellence in Research

Ascoli

The Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research: Giorgio A. Ascoli is a University Professor in the Bioengineering Department in the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) and Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience (IPN) in the College of Science. He joined the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at Mason in 1997 and is also founder and director of the Center for Neural Informatics, Structures, and Plasticity, a transdisciplinary research group.

Ascoli is founding editor of the journal Neuroinformatics and has contributed to the establishment of the fields of computational neuroanatomy and neuroinformatics. His laboratory investigates brain structure, activity, and function from the cellular to the circuit level. In the long term, Ascoli seeks to create large-scale, anatomically plausible neural networks to model entire portions of a mammalian brain.

Ascoli received the 2012 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. He was elected an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow in 2022 and won the National Institutes of Health and Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology DataWorks!Challenge Distinguished Achievement Award in 2023. His 2015 book Trees of the Brain, Roots of the Mind was published by MIT Press.

Gest

Justin Gest is an associate professor of policy and government at the Schar School of Policy and Government. He studies immigration and the politics of demographic change. He is the author of six books and a coeditor of the Oxford University Press book series, Oxford Studies in Migration and Citizenship.

Gest has written peer-reviewed articles in a variety of journals and has provided reporting or commentary for ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, NPR, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, Vox, and the Washington Post.

In 2013, Gest received the Star Family Prize for Student Advising and, in 2014, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize. These awards are Harvard University’s highest for student advising and faculty teaching, respectively. He has also earned the 2020 ��AV Teaching Excellence Award. He has served as a consultant to various government agencies and civil society organizations.

Lowder

Evan Marie Lowder, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society in CHSS, researches strategies to reduce justice system contact and improve behavioral health outcomes among adults in the justice system or at risk of justice system involvement. Her work seeks to elevate decarceral strategies that promote individuals’ risk management and their connections to needed services in the community. She is also interested in understanding what drives disparate outcomes in the legal system, particularly for Black individuals.

Since joining Mason in 2019, Lowder has received more than $1 million in funding from local, state, and national organizations to study early intervention strategies that connect justice-involved individuals to community-based treatment, facilitate release from pretrial detention, and improve community outcomes. Her research routinely involves collaboration with professionals in local community organizations, jails, pretrial services, courts, and community corrections. At Mason, she directs the Early Justice Strategies Lab, which trains undergraduate and graduate students in applied research methods.

Yan

Zhisheng Yan, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology in CEC and a member of Mason’s Center for Secure Information Systems, develops immersive multimedia systems such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for use in everyday life. Yan has launched a research program that replaces smartphones with smart headwear to enable immersive computing at scale. For this innovative research, he has received both the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award and Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative Award.

Yan has chaired the Technical Program Committee for four international conferences and codirected the Review Committee of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Multimedia Communications Technical Committee. His services and leadership have been recognized with an IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Outstanding Reviewer Award, an IEEE SmartWorld Congress Outstanding Service Award, and an IEEE Cybermatics Congress Outstanding Leadership Award.

Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion

Craig

United Bank Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion: Richard T. Craig, an associate professor in Department of Communication and director of the MA in Communication Program in CHSS, began his career at Mason as a Preparing Future Faculty Fellow in 2009. Upon receiving his PhD from Howard University in 2011, he was appointed to a tenure-track position. He earned tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2017 and has served as the director of the Communication MA Program since that time.

In 2020–21, Craig was part of the faculty leadership team that planned the scale-up of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) course that was approved to meet both Global Understanding and Social and Behavioral Sciences requirements for the Mason Core.

He has served as a member of the Just Society Task Force that worked with a subset of the Mason Core Committee and also served on the Quality Enhancement Plan Development Committee, which created the Transformative Education through Anti-Racist Community Engagement plan.

Currently, Craig is working to establish the Pop Culture Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access studies (IDEAs) Lab promoting and encouraging scholarship with a range of interest in pop culture.

Auerbach

Jonathan Auerbach is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics within CEC. His research covers topics at the intersection of statistics and public policy, including urban analytics, open data, and the collection, evaluation, and communication of official statistics.

The 2016 Public Understanding of Statistics Fellow and the 2020 Science Policy Fellow at the American Statistical Association, Auerbach has published research on pressing societal issues, such as the rise in middle-age mortality, the persistent gender gap in STEM, the security and accessibility of elections, and the quality of the Census. He is the principal investigator on a grant to study disparate health care outcomes arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, and a coprincipal investigator on a grant to study the state of United States’ data infrastructure.

Auerbach created a class unit in which students investigate the state of diversity and inclusion at Mason, as well as the use of campus water fountains and recycling bins.

Soundararajan

Shvetha Soundararajan is an instructional associate professor in the Department of Computer Science in CEC. At Mason since 2016, she is a strong advocate for women in the fields of computing and engineering. She leads the Break Through Tech DC initiative at Mason, which seeks to increase the number of women graduating with computing degrees and pursuing technology careers. In this role, Soundararajan is primarily involved in curriculum innovations and community building efforts that help increase the number of women studying and majoring in computer science at Mason.

Her research interests include agile transformation, requirements engineering, software architecture, and computer science education. She strives to inspire her students to learn and appreciate computer science, explore new ideas, and articulate their thoughts well. She has taught both introductory and advanced courses in computer science and software engineering.

Faculty Excellence in Social Impact

Jones

Earle C. Williams Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Social Impact: R. Christian Jones is a professor of aquatic ecology in the College of Science’s Department of Environmental Science and Policy, which he cofounded in 2000 and led as its first chair. He is also founder and director of the Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center (PEREC) at the Potomac Science Center.

Jones arrived at Mason in the fall of 1980 just as the doctoral program in environmental science and public policy was launched, and he served as the director of the program from 1992 to 1995. In 1984, Jones initiated the long-term ecological study of Gunston Cove. This study, which involves biology and environmental science and policy faculty and is partially funded by Fairfax County, has trained more than 100 graduate and undergraduate students, produced more than 20 PhD dissertations and MS theses, and won U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awards for Environmental Excellence. The study is recognized as one of the nation’s longest-running aquatic ecology monitoring programs.

In the early 1990s, Jones and former Mason professor Don Kelso began their quest for an aquatic ecology lab. Their quest was fulfilled in 2018 when Mason opened the Potomac Science Center and PEREC, which currently houses the largest tidal freshwater research facility in the country.

Koper

Christopher S. Koper is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society in CHSS and the principal fellow of Mason’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. He specializes in issues related to policing, firearms policy, program evaluation, and evidence-based policy and practice. Koper has conducted extensive research for the U.S. Department of Justice and worked with many criminal justice practitioners and policymakers locally, nationally, and globally on the development, implementation, and evaluation of policies and programs.

Koper’s studies on firearms policy and policing have been cited extensively by policymakers and the media and used by numerous police agencies in the United States and internationally. Koper is a fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, coeditor of Criminology & Public Policy, coauthor of the award-winning book Evidence-Based Policing: Translating Research into Practice, and a recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Division of Policing of the American Society of Criminology.

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Six honored with Presidential Medals for Faculty Excellence

Melanie Balog — Tue, 11 May 2021 14:28:20 +0000

Six honored with Presidential Medals for Faculty Excellence Melanie Balog Tue, 05/11/2021 - 10:28

��AV President Gregory Washington has announced the recipients of the 2021 Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence honoring the contributions of six Mason professors to the university, Mason students, and the greater community.

Established in 2017, the presidential medals are awarded for excellence in research and scholarship, teaching, social impact, and diversity and inclusion. A fall celebration is planned to honor the recipients as part of the Mason Vision Series.

The Presidential Awards committee review team, which solicits nominations each year, is made up of faculty representatives, including prior award winners, and senior leaders. See past winners here.

The Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research and Scholarship: The recipients are Amarda Shehu, a founder and co-director of the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnerships in the Volgenau School of Engineering, and Jagadish Shukla, University Professor in the College of Science and director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA).

Shehu

In Mason’s Department of Computer Science since 2008, Shehu’s research bridges the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the biological sciences. As one of the founders and co-directors of the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnerships, she uses computer science to promote scientific discoveries in other fields, with application to real-world problems. She has developed algorithmic frameworks that shed new light on the molecular dynamics behind the mutations that lead to biological disorders, such as cancer, cardiomyopathy, and, most recently, COVID-19. Her honors at Mason include the OSCAR Mentoring Excellence Award; the Emerging Researcher, Scholar, Creator Award; and the Teaching Excellence Award. She serves as a program director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Shukla

Shukla, in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, has transformed the field of climate science. At Mason since 1994, he established the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies. He has challenged assumptions by examining how air-land and air-sea interactions influence climate variability, and his work includes studies of global deforestation, desertification and monsoons as examples of phenomena in which interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface play a critical role. The recipient of the highest awards from two international meteorological societies, Shukla has formed prominent centers and research groups and chaired several World Meteorological Organization programs. He was lead author on a chapter of the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which, together with Al Gore, received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Broeckelman-Post

John Toups Presidential Medal for Excellence in Teaching: Melissa Broeckelman-Post, hired in 2013 in the Department of Communication in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, innovatively redesigned a required communication course using a combination of online instruction, in-person lab-style workshops, and discussions taught by graduate teaching assistants. The National Communication Association (NCA) awarded this course the Program of Excellence Award in 2016. The redesign also involved the creation of a Communication Center where students practice their communication skills and receive individualized coaching. Broeckelman-Post has co-authored three textbooks on communication instruction, one of which received the Textbook of Distinction Award in 2015 from the NCA.

Seshaiyer

Earle C. Williams Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Social Impact: Padmanabhan (Padhu) Seshaiyer, at Mason since 2007, is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Science. In his research he develops analytical techniques and computational algorithms in an effort to understand and solve a wide range of problems, including the physiology of the human vascular system, the mechanics of brain aneurysms, the motion of micro-air vehicles, the spread of the Zika virus, and drone-based efforts to prevent elephant and rhino poaching in Tanzania. Seshaiyer has initiated and directed a variety of educational outreach programs and received many high-profile awards for his teaching, research and outreach.

United Bank Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion: The recipients are Christy Pichichero, an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and the Department of History and Art History, both in CHSS, and Gerald Weatherspoon, associate professor in the College of Science.

Pichichero

At Mason since 2011, Pichichero in 2018 took on a dual role as a Provost Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Well-being in Faculty Affairs and Development and as the CHSS coordinator of college diversity and global education. She researched best practices for recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty and curated an extensive set of online resources to help departments model those practices. In 2020 she was named the CHSS director of faculty diversity. She is currently writing a book about Chevalier Joseph Bologne de Saint-George, a mixed-race musical composer and military commander in 18th-century France, through the lens of critical race studies. Pichichero is president of the Western Society for French History.

Weatherspoon

In 2002, Weatherspoon was the first African American faculty member to be tenured in a STEM field at Mason. He joined Mason in 1996 and is chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. In this role he has sought opportunities to hire women and faculty members from other underrepresented communities and mentor and prepare them for leadership positions. He has taken similar steps in graduate student recruitment and retention. Weatherspoon serves as chief diversity officer for faculty in the College of Science and is faculty advisor for the Mason chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers.