Press Release

Regents Present Awards to 13 Faculty Members for Public Service, Mentoring, Research, Scholarship, Collaboration, Teaching

At its April 7 meeting, the University System of Maryland Board of Regents will honor 13 faculty members from institutions across the USM for their outstanding contributions in one of five areas: public service, research, collaboration, mentoring, and teaching.

"These faculty members, recommended by the Regents Faculty Award Committee, represent the ideal in areas essential to the mission of higher education," said Nathan A. Chapman, Jr., chairman of the Board. "They have demonstrated a high level of dedication to their craft, and the Board is pleased to bestow its highest honor upon them." Each award recipient will receive $1,000 and a plaque.

The Board of Regents established the Faculty Awards in 1995 to publicly recognize distinguished performance by educators and researchers within the University System. The Regents Faculty Award Committee, comprised of faculty from the USM's research and comprehensive institutions as well as one member from the System Headquarters staff, receives nominations from the president of each institution, along with the nominees' portfolios. The portfolios provided documentation of outstanding performance in the award category for which the faculty member was nominated. Each nominee must have served as a USM faculty member for at least five years.

This year's award winner for Excellence in Collaboration is:

J. Kevin Eckert, professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Exceptional Sponsored Research Fellow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Eckert has been at the forefront of collaborative curriculum, teaching, and research efforts. He is known among his colleagues for a remarkable ability to bring disparate groups together, dedication to excellence, and an ability to inspire others. Eckert was a prime mover in the development of an interdisciplinary doctoral program in Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC), which involves faculty from five departments at UMBC and faculty from four other USM campuses: Coppin State College, Frostburg State, Salisbury State, and Towson universities. In addition, his collaborative efforts with the University of Maryland, Baltimore; the University of Maryland Graduate School, Baltimore; and the University of Maryland, College Park, are noteworthy. In a groundbreaking collaborative study with colleagues in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, for instance, Eckert illuminated the medical and functional outcomes of long-term care for the elderly in the ever-expanding industry of assisted-living facilities.

The award winners for Excellence in Mentoring are:

Jay Freyman, associate professor in the Department of Ancient Studies and director of the Honors College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Freyman is highly regarded for the inspirational and dynamic leadership he provides to students and to the university community. Through his example, he has inspired a tradition of mentoring at the university - a tradition that has benefited all UMBC students. Freyman has acted as a career advisor and personal counselor to and tireless advocate for numerous students. From these individual mentoring relationships, he has developed a variety of effective mentoring strategies that have become the basis of mentoring efforts across the institution. Much of Freyman's mentoring has been related to his role as Director of UMBC's Honors College. In this capacity, he visits Maryland high schools to recruit for the Honors College and the Ancient Studies Program and designs special seminars for Honors College students on topics such as the nature of liberal education. He has worked with groups as diverse as the Senior Men's Fellowship of the Baltimore Jewish Congregation, Crofton Middle School, Lansdowne High School, and the Cecil County Students' Forum. His mentoring and teaching extend to voluntary service with Associated Jewish Charities, where he assists recent Russian immigrants with the development of conversational English skills.

Byron Warnken, associate professor in the School of Law at the University of Baltimore. During his 23 years as a faculty member at UB, Warnken has generously given his time to assist students. On a voluntary basis, he has provided supplemental classes on study techniques, on writing, on examination preparation, and on research. His tireless efforts have resulted in enhanced experiential-learning and employment opportunities for law students and graduates. One of Warnken's most significant contributions is the EXPLOR (Experience in Legal Organizations) Program. It was designed to provide law students with internship experiences in professional settings during the summer following the first year of legal studies. Warnken has made use of his extensive network of judges and lawyers to identify internship sites and develop clerk positions and other employment positions for UB law students and graduates. Over the course of the six summers that the EXPLOR Program has been in operation, 400 UB law students have been placed in summer positions. In addition, Warnken has actively and energetically assisted UB law students who aspire to judicial clerkships upon graduation, helping UB to achieve one of the highest percentages of graduates in the nation entering judicial clerkships. Warnken's mentoring does not end at graduation. He provides ongoing advice, guidance, support, and encouragement to former students. His active maintenance of these relationships has ultimately benefited not only his former students but also his current generation of students, some of whom participate in summer internships that grow out of his relationships with alumni.

J. Lynn Zimmerman, associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Zimmerman is known throughout the UMBC community as a rigorous scholar equally devoted to her research and her students. In her 10 years at UMBC, she has nurtured numerous undergraduate and graduate students. They in turn have gone on to conduct graduate and postdoctoral work at some of the most prestigious universities in the nation and abroad. In addition to her success as a research mentor, Zimmerman has worked with more than 700 undergraduates as a mentor/advisor to the award-winning UMBC chapter of the Golden Key National Honor Society. Under her direction, UMBC Golden Key students organize regional conferences, community-service and fund-raising projects, academic showcases, and student-recognition ceremonies. The National Golden Key Society recognized the overall accomplishments of the chapter with its highest honor, the Golden Key Award, in 1997. In 1998, the National Golden Key Society honored Zimmerman by naming her the Mid-Atlantic Region Advisor of the Year.

The award winners for Excellence in Public Service are:

Samia Elias, associate professor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry, Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the Dental School at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Elias's public-service activities are diverse. From 1993 to the present, she has been at the helm of Project Independence, an initiative for providing dental care to women attempting to end their reliance on public programs. She also plays a lead role is the Complete Denture Externship Program. Its participants traveled to an impoverished Caribbean area and provided free dental care to many in need. Currently, the project focuses on providing dental care to native Americans. Independently implementing the entire program, Elias coordinates the selection and preparation of the students, obtains and transports laboratory equipment, and obtains housing and transportation for the students. She also teaches and supervises students and recruits faculty and private practitioners to join. The program provides opportunities for University of Maryland dental students to gain clinical and laboratory experiences that move them to high levels of capability in prosthetics and that increase their self-confidence in treating patients. Elias also serves as faculty advisor to the student chapter of the American Association of Women Dentists, mentoring a number of women who have gone on to hold positions in local and state dental associations.

Charles Wellford, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park. Throughout the three decades he has been a faculty member at UMCP, Wellford has served local governments and the state in a host of ways while meeting his teaching, research, student-mentoring, and university- and professional-service responsibilities at the highest levels. He has continued to be a dominant intellectual force in the discipline of criminology and is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and of several books. Under his leadership and through his efforts, his academic department has risen to the highest national ranking. Over the years, Wellford has employed his scholarly expertise and his leadership skills to serve state and local policy makers as well as federal criminal-justice administrators. He is a frequent contributor to surveys on crime in the state and in local municipalities. His participation in these efforts is consistent with his most recent research, which has focused on the determinants of sentencing, the development of comparative crime data systems, and the measurement of white-collar crime. Wellford is a member of the Maryland Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, the Maryland Police Training Commission, the Criminal Justice Information System Advisory Board, and the Governor's Justice Assistance Board.

George I. Whitehead, professor and chairman of the Department of Psychology, Salisbury State University. Whitehead's commitment to public service is demonstrated through his participation in the Wicomico County Board of Education, the Governor's Office on Service and Volunteerism, the lower-Shore AmeriCorps Program, and Salisbury's Institute for Service Learning. Through his contributions to these entities, he has had a major positive impact not only at the local level but also at the state level. Whitehead was appointed by Gov. Parris Glendening to the Wicomico County School Board and was subsequently elected president of the Board of Education. His leadership ensured a smooth redistricting process to meet the changing needs of Wicomico County's citizens. Whitehead played a pivotal role in securing an AmeriCorps program that focused on the needs of adolescents on Maryland's lower Eastern Shore. In 1998, the program received the first Governor's Trailblazer Award for its innovative approach to securing job placements for welfare-to-work recipients. Building on a successful history of engaging AmeriCorps members in the lives of adolescents, Whitehead, along with another colleague, submitted a grant application to the Corporation for National Service to engage Salisbury faculty and students in service learning. This successful application gave rise to the Institute for Service Learning. These efforts resulted in more than 600 students being engaged in service-learning courses during the 1999-2000 academic year.

The award winners for Excellence in Research/Scholarship/Creative Activity are:

Hossein Arsham, Harry Wright Distinguished Research Professor of Statistics and Management Science at the University of Baltimore. Arsham has amassed an outstanding record of publication. Most notably, he has done pioneering work that has enabled businesses to find "exact" or "desirable" solutions to problems with efficiency and enhanced speed in "a single simulation run." Since he joined the UB faculty, he has published more than 70 refereed articles and chapters on a host of topics in computational probability and statistics. During the last three years, he has published 28 journal articles and book chapters on discrete-event systems simulation, optimization with sensitivity analysis, and computational probability and statistics. His work has been cited in at least five books and at least 12 journal articles/book chapters. Arsham is currently the principal associate editor of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, the official journal of the International Association of Statistical Computing, a section of the International Statistics Institute (one of the oldest scientific societies in the world); he has been an associate editor for the journal since 1989. Since 1997, he has been an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Reasoning and an editor of both InterStat: Statistics on the Internet and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics. Arsham's accomplishments in research and scholarship have led to his selection for the Black and Decker Corporation Research Award for contributions to simulation and optimization. Additionally, he has been named a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Fellow of the Operational Research Society, and a Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications.

William Carpenter, professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland. Under Carpenter's leadership, the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center has become an internationally recognized first-tier site of mental-illness research. He has developed an interdisciplinary research team that is making important contributions to clinical and basic science. In a closely knit, integrative framework, independent laboratories are involved in developmental biology, neuroanatomy, cellular physiology, the neurobiology of stress, pharmacology and receptor physiology, behavioral pharmacology, and the biochemistry of neurodegeneration and neuroprotection. Carpenter's laboratory work is focused on identifying psychopathologic entities within schizophrenia, describing the underlying neural circuits and developing new treatments. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Carpenter has been one of the leading researchers in the world in the area of schizophrenia. During the last three years alone, he has published more than thirty articles/chapters. Even more impressive than his large number of publications is their quality. His work has routinely appeared in the finest journals; a review of science citation-index documents reveals that other researchers regularly cite his work. Evidence of his stature in the scholarly community is provided through his selection to serve on editorial boards of scientific journals. Presently, he is on the editorial boards of seven journals, including the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Psychiatry Research, and Neuropsychopharmacology.

Roy Mariuzza, professor in the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Mariuzza has established an international reputation in the area of structure-function relations of immune-system receptors. In addition to engaging in groundbreaking research, he has participated in the education of a host of postdoctoral students, training them in molecular biology, protein chemistry, and x-ray crystallography. In 1995, Mariuzza reported the first three-dimensional structure of a specific chain of a T cell antigen receptor (TCR) in an article that Science recognized as a classic in the field. A major breakthrough, this research provided immunologists with information that allowed them for the first time to visualize directly the basis for recognition of foreign proteins and initiation of immune responses by the TCR. Additionally, his work has contributed to the understanding of a unique class of T cells, which are thought to be the first line of defense against diseases such as tuberculosis. He is currently engaged in work on the structural basis of autoimmune diseases, especially multiple sclerosis. Mariuzza's work has been recognized widely by immunologists as well as the general scientific community; this recognition has led to numerous publications in leading journals, to commentaries by editors of these journals, and to illustrations on covers of several journals.

This year's award winners for Excellence in Teaching are:

Jordan Goodman, professor and chairman of the Physics Department, University of Maryland, College Park. Much of Goodman's research activity is tied to his membership in an international astrophysicis team whose discoveries of properties of the neutrino have captured the interests not only of the scientific community but also of the general public as well. Specifically, in what many believe to be the biggest discovery in physics in 1999, Goodman's astrophysics team, working in Japan, has detected neutrinos that are generated by cosmic rays entering Earth's upper atmosphere. Additionally, he is co-leading a project, in the mountains of New Mexico, to develop a new cosmic-ray detector. Goodman has been an excellent mentor of graduate and undergraduate students. Students rate him consistently as an outstanding teacher because he facilitates their experiential learning, because he brings high energy and "down-to-earth intelligence" to his lectures, and because he engages his students through active learning. Notably, Goodman has extended his teaching and research beyond the university. He leads TGIP (Thank Goodness It's Physics), a student-recruitment program which brings speakers engaged in cutting-edge research to high schools. He has given research presentations to the U.S. Physics Olympiad Team every year since 1986. He also has provided research presentations to prospective physics students during his department's annual fall open house, and has worked in bridge programs that attract underrepresented students to the sciences.

John Jeffries, professor of history, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. As his students and colleagues have indicated, not only the quantity of Jeffries's instructional load but also the quality of his instruction has distinguished him. Both undergraduate and graduate students have consistently give him the highest ratings for his teaching as well as accolades for the time he devotes to research direction and advisement beyond the classroom. His colleagues at the university consider him a consummate teaching mentor. Jeffries has devoted much of his time to directing undergraduate and graduate theses and independent-study activities in history. Because his advising and mentoring are of the finest quality, the best and brightest students seek him out. He directs most of the undergraduate projects in history, and he has taken on more than his share of graduate students. Beyond the campus, Jeffries has worked closely with the Maryland State Department of Education to promote better instruction in public schools through the development of new standards for the teaching of American history. As co-founder and co-director of the Center for History Education at UMBC, he has trained K-12 teachers to meet these new standards through summer institutes and pedagogical training seminars. The skill and commitment Jeffries brings to teaching are inseparable from his exemplary and exhaustive scholarship on the history of American society during the World War II era. In the area of pedagogy and curriculum design, he has been a national leader. He co-authored an influential textbook, designed an internationally based distance-learning history course, reviewed numerous general history textbooks, and served as a consultant for the Educational Testing Service Advanced Placement Program in history.

Ronn Pineo, associate professor in the History Department at Towson University. Pineo has won the respect and admiration of his students and his colleagues for his teaching abilities and achievements. When students have evaluated his performance, they have frequently given him the highest possible score. Peers who have evaluated his performance in the classroom describe him as a superb teacher who is a master of Socratic dialogue. For Pineo, teaching is not confined to the classroom; he devotes many hours every week to individual conferences with his students, a form of conscientiousness that his colleagues admire greatly. As a result of his efforts in and beyond the classroom, interest in Latin American history has increased over the years at Towson. Pineo has also engaged in course and program development. He chaired the History Department project that led to the creation of a pending Master of Arts program in comparative world history. He helped to develop a team-taught interdisciplinary general-education course, "Plagues and Peoples," to meet the university's requirement in science, technology, and modern society. The course brings together faculty members from history, biology, and geography; Dr. Pineo teaches this course as part of a team. Additionally, he helped to develop two other interdisciplinary general-education courses. Finally, as coordinator of Latin American Studies, he participated in the redesign of the major and the creation of a new minor; the changes in the program have increased emphasis on applied learning and internship experiences. Pineo has excelled as a teacher while continuing his scholarly work and while participating in service activities. During the last three years alone, he has co-edited a book on Latin America, published a book on Ecuador, and has presented at three conferences. During this same period, he has won several honors and awards in recognition of his prowess as a teacher and scholar.

Contact:

Chris Hart
Phone: 301/445-2739
Pager: 301/507-2316
E-mail: chart@usmd.edu

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