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Recognizing faculty achievement across ASU


Faculty Achievement winners
April 18, 2013

ASU President Michael M. Crow joined Executive Vice President and University Provost Elizabeth D. Phillips, along with other university leaders, academic deans and the Sun Devil Family Association, April 16, in the Ventana Ballroom of the Tempe campus Memorial Union, to honor the outstanding achievements of faculty across Arizona State University.

The 2013 Faculty Excellence Awards included such honors as the Diversity Achievement Awards, the Faculty Achievement Awards, 2013 Professor of the Year, and President's Professors.

Below is a list of the faculty achievement honorees:

Excellence in Curricular Innovation
Miles Orchinik
School of Life Sciences

Miles Orchinik has dramatically changed life science education at ASU, driven by the question: “How can an excellent education be implemented with the greatest access?” His visionary leadership of the curriculum reform committee in the School of Life Sciences led to the creation of the first active-learning classroom at the university, the development of an innovative teaching assistant program, and the redesign of introductory biology courses. Those courses are now guided by the exploration of compelling and timely questions in a “flipped-classroom” approach that combines opportunities to learn basic facts online with the examination and discussion of challenging concepts in lectures and small groups.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Best Performance or Artwork
Stephen Marc
School of Art

Stephen Marc, a faculty member in the photography program, is a master of digital compositing. He is recognized here for his work “Passage on the Underground Railroad,” an exploration of this important chapter in American history. It encompasses large, digital prints of complex composites of photographs and graphic imagery collected for his 2009 book of the same name. “Passages” has been honored with solo exhibitions in venues significant to its subject matter, most notably at the Gibbs Museum of Art in South Carolina, the University Art Gallery at the University of Buffalo and an upcoming show at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Natural Sciences/Math
Roy Curtiss III
School of Life Sciences

Roy Curtiss’s recent work at ASU has concentrated on developing strategies to create vaccines safe and effective in newborns and individuals who are malnourished, immunodeficient or pregnant. His group’s latest accomplishment has been the development of a vaccine against the influenza virus, involving induction of cross-protective immunity to shared influenza antigens and strain-specific immunity using a newly perfected means to successfully deliver a DNA vaccine. These vaccines can be preserved in a stable, freeze-dried form and reconstituted at time of use for oral, needle-free delivery.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Natural Sciences/Math
Ben A. Minteer
School of Life Sciences

Ben Minteer is an environmental ethicist and conservation scholar working at the intersection of the humanities and the social and life sciences. Much of Minteer’s research effort has been driven by three broad questions: How can we better understand public value pluralism in responsible environmental decision-making? What is the legacy of the American environmental tradition for addressing today’s emerging conservation and sustainability challenges? How does environmental change impact understandings of environmental responsibility? Minteer has published more than 50 articles and book chapters and five books exploring these and related issues.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Professional Application
Michelene T. H. Chi
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College

Self-explanation, as coined by Michelene Chi, refers to a technique by which a student generates inferences, relations, questions or elaborations while learning. By associating this new information, students can move themselves to deeper understanding and learn more effectively. Since students can relate new information to general or commonsense knowledge, the value of this learning tool extends across age groups and subject domains. Chi’s work has been replicated more than 100 times, cited more than 5,000 times and recommended by the U.S. Department of Education as a best practice for improving student learning. Chi’s work is also cited by the Association for Psychological Science as one of 25 principles of learning.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Professional Application
Jonathan Ketcham
W. P. Carey School of Business

Jonathan Ketcham is producing path-breaking research that applies economic theory to our understanding and practive of the United States healthcare system. His research centers on how incentives and information influence decision-making by health care professionals and health care consumers. Ketcham’s work applies econometric methods to novel data with the objective of improving health care delivery in the United States. He is recognized here for his pioneering analysis of consumers’ choices of insurance plans in Medicare Part D. His work offers timely insights to researchers, managers and policymakers at this crucial time in our nation’s health care system.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Social Sciences
Cassia Spohn
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Cassia Spohn’s research has both defined her field and dramatically affected the practice of criminal justice. As a result, she has become a pivotal figure in two areas of great importance to law, social sciences and contemporary society: the intersection of race, crime and justice; and sentencing by criminal courts. Her work in sentencing and judicial decision-making sets the agenda for understanding key areas of criminal justice and frames the research agenda for future scholarship.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Innovation
David H. Frakes
School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering

David Frakes’ groundbreaking software platform, the EndoVascular Interventional Suite (EVIS), promises to radically enhance the personalized management of cerebral aneurysms. Utilizing advanced medical device models and personalized clinical data to simulate the deployment of endovascular devices, and applying state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics to model outcomes, EVIS will introduce a new endovascular treatment paradigm where quantitative engineering interacts seamlessly with personalized treatment design.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Young Investigator
S. Banu Ozkan
Department of Physics

S. Banu Ozkan has developed a significant and defined research vision that explores the sequence-structure-function relationship of proteins, or “protein folding problem,” and the role of protein-protein and protein-peptide interactions in defining functions in a cell. Ozkan has established new modeling approaches to address the problem of protein folding using multi-scale techniques to capture a more accurate picture of protein dynamics. Similar approaches she has developed could substantially affect knowledge of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and chronic pain.

Defining Edge Research and Creative Work – Young Investigator
Zhen Zhang
W. P. Carey School of Business

Zhen Zhang’s research focuses on leadership processes and leadership development. His scholarship emphasizes followers and their interaction with designated leaders, exploring theory and analysis at the individual, leader-follower dyadic and team levels. His work addresses crucial questions of whether leadership can be developed or is predominantly genetically determined, and what kind of social and developmental factors might increase the likelihood that an individual becomes a leader.