Today@Sam Article
Introducing The 2024 Faculty Excellence Winners
Sept. 6, 2024
SHSU Media Contact: Mikah Boyd
Sam Houston State University professors whose scholarly accomplishments, service and academic engagement stand out among their peers have been honored with the 2024 Faculty Excellence Awards. The recipients are Tamara Cook, Excellence in Teaching; Maria Botero, Excellence in Service; Jaime Anderson, Excellence in Scholarly & Creative Accomplishments; Olga Minich, Non-Tenure Track Teaching; Magdalena Denham, David Payne Academic Community Engagement Award; and John Strait, C-USA Faculty Achievement Award.
Each year, the university invites the Bearkat community to nominate faculty members who have consistently demonstrated excellence. A committee reviews the nominations and selects winners to be honored at the Annual Faculty/Staff Meeting and receive a financial stipend.
Excellence in Teaching:
Tamara Cook, Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
Tamara Cook has been shaping young minds at SHSU since 1999, and during her tenure she has solidified the idea that learning should continue beyond the classroom. By employing innovative and non-traditional teaching methods, she has effectively taught biological sciences to students of all majors.
Because of her success, proven by consistently high IDEA course evaluations from her students, Cook’s peers within the Department of Biological Sciences have leaned on her to create or assist in the development and review of curriculum for seven other courses. She has also previously served as the department chair and is a continuous member of the departmental curriculum committee.
On top of this, she also guides honors students in undergraduate research activities, encouraging them to dive deeper into the material they learn in class while also helping them fulfill their required honors contracts. While this work is not included in her regular teaching load, Cook continues to put in the extra effort so that her students can present their work at regional and national scientific conferences and have their work included in peer-reviewed journals.
Comments:
“Tamara Cook is an amazing teacher. The way she does lectures is especially fun! She also provides videos, website links and other resources to students to dive further into the information, but she also really helps students who learn well from diverse methods of teaching. She is very incredible in relating what students are learning about real-life situations; explaining why it is important to know these things, even if students are not science majors.”
Excellence in Service:
María Botero, Professor, Department of Psychology & Philosophy
María Botero is a leader. Since she joined the department in 2010, Botero has worked to better the lives of her coworkers and the experiences of her students. She serves as a leader in her department and on campus as the chair of multiple committees.
Her approach to work centers around supporting the well-being of all students, faculty and staff members who cross her path. One example stems from the struggles Botero faced when she became a new parent and had to balance her duties in the classroom as a tenure-track professor and her responsibilities at home as a new mom. After seeing and experiencing a need for extra support, she joined the Faculty Senate in 2016 and created a policy that established guidelines for determining the teaching workload for those caring for a new child or ailing loved one.
In her efforts to provide students with the best educational experience, Botero has offered up her time to mentor students. To further serve students and provide them with opportunities to professionally present their work, she has served on committees and moderated panel discussions for student groups including the Elliot T. Bowers Honors College and the McNair Scholars Program.
Botero has also contributed to her field of study by serving as an editor for numerous academic psychology and philosophy journals, including PhilPapers, International Journal of Comparative Psychology and more.
Comments:
“As our program’s only active tenured faculty, Botero is the only philosophy faculty member who serves on Departmental Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee (DPTAC) committees, which is crucially important because our program has three assistant professors. Working with the three of us to give us advice on putting together our committee members and how to craft portfolios and narratives that will be intelligible and well-received by our interdisciplinary audience has taken a great deal of Botero’s time. She is mentoring the three of us through the tenure process and putting in every possible effort to see us through to success. My colleagues and immensely appreciate how much work Botero puts in to ensure we are on the right path and do not face any undue anxiety.”
Excellence in Scholarly & Creative Accomplishments:
Jaime Anderson, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology & Philosophy
In her eight years of working at SHSU, Jaime Anderson has made waves in her field by aggressively researching new concepts within applied psychological practice. Her area of expertise centers around the conceptualization of personality disorders, the use of psychological assessment instruments to bridge the gap between science and practice in clinical diagnoses and psychopathology and psychological assessment in legal settings.
Anderson's work has been published in 60 publications, including 43 peer-reviewed papers. She has experience collaborating with researchers from across the country and around the world, including New Zealand, Iran, Poland, Spain, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The impact of her work cannot be understated, with Google Scholar reporting that Anderson’s published works dating back to 2016 have been cited over 750 times, and her entire body of work has been cited over 2,000 times across its history.
Outside of academia, Anderson’s research has had a major impact on the practice of clinical psychology. She served as a contributing author of the Technical Manual for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-3 (MMPI-3), the second-most used test in all clinical psychology practice, behind only intelligence testing. One of her research papers was also reportedly used in a criminal court case to support a psychologist’s decision.
Comments:
“Her relatively early career stage makes her substantial impact on the field of Personality Assessment all the more exceptional and deserving of recognition. She is a leading expert on psychological assessment. Her work has influenced the development of emerging models of personality pathology and commonly used assessment instruments. Her work has not only had a substantial impact in shaping her field in terms of research but has also had a direct impact on the way clinicians care for their patients.”
Non-Tenure Track Teaching:
Olga Minich, Lecturer, Department of Biological Sciences
All educators know the challenges that come with controlling a classroom. It takes a special breed of talent to stand in front of hundreds of students at a time and deliver compelling material that engages the masses. Since joining the Department of Biological Sciences as a lecturer in 2017, Olga Minich has done just that.
Many of Minich’s lectures, such as her anatomy and physiology courses, are prerequisites taken by incoming students experiencing college for the first time. Her engaging approach ensures that each of them are given the best opportunity to be successful and well-equipped for the next step in their academic journeys. She has mastered this art through vast experience at both the secondary and collegiate levels.
Minich is well aware that her guidance is just as critical outside of the lecture hall as it is inside. Due to her vast number of students, she personally meets with upwards of 10 students per day who are seeking to perfect their study skills.
In her brief tenure at SHSU, Minich has earned an Adjunct Faculty Excellence in Teaching designation as well as an Odyssey Travel Grant Award. The latter provides funds for faculty members to attend professional development conferences or workshops to further knowledge of active learning techniques.
Comments:
“I have been able to observe Olga firsthand in the classroom on two occasions. One was during her participation in the Engaging Classrooms Week program and the second was when I visited her Anatomy & Physiology course last semester. The A&P course includes numerous teaching challenges: a large classroom, high enrollment, being a pre-requisite course, which students consider a barrier, along with being all non-majors. Olga demonstrated an awareness of those challenges and skilled approaches to address them. In particular, her classroom management was impressive. Having 200 students pay attention and be engaged for the whole class time was impressive.”
David Payne Academic Community Engagement (ACE) Award:
Magdalena Denham, Professor of Practice, Department of Security Studies
SHSU understands that real-world experiences are a critical aspect of the learning process across all fields. When educating students in areas that directly impact the safety of others, this component becomes all the more crucial. Magdalena Denham has accelerated her students’ ability to expect the unexpected while simultaneously advancing community preparedness.
During her tenure, Denham has incorporated student involvement in the design of the university’s first-ever KatSafe webpage, which proved invaluable during Hurricane Harvey. Her team has also helped orchestrate drills that assist organizations with active shooter protocols.
Her work has resulted in grants from the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) as well as efforts committed to child-centered risk reduction and disaster preparedness and response. She has garnered a number of prestigious awards prior to this distinction, including the 2024 Gulf South Summit (GSS) Award for Outstanding Faculty Contributions to Service-Learning in Higher Education and SHSU’s Criminal Justice Service Award.
Denham’s tutelage has proved invaluable for SHSU students pursuing careers as federal agents, emergency management coordinators and educational roles. Her work on campus and in the community delivers life-saving information to citizens and responders by meeting them where they are at, preventing untold misery.
Comments:
“As chief of police and the emergency management coordinator for the City of Willis, I had the honor of being selected as a panel member for the presentation of the threat and vulnerability assessment conducted by Denham’s graduate students, and their recommendations for a community in the Willis area. This project broke new ground in the field of emergency management, bringing theory into practice in the everyday lives of a group of people who experience that. The students had gotten to know and care about the staff and residents as fellow human beings, and were very concerned about their safety and wellbeing.”
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