Over 2,000 students were seen in the Counseling Center last year, and Gibbs met each of them at least once. Whether scheduling appointments over the phone or in-person or assisting with requests for emergency counseling, she offers a professional presence and a kind and welcoming demeanor to students, many of whom are seeking mental health services for the first time.
Mike Poterala, vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, noted the leading role she has played in developing and updating policies and procedures on addressing allegations of sexual misconduct and nondiscrimination.
A tireless advocate who serves on countless hiring and planning committees, Stern has focused on securing and maintaining funds for operating and capital expenses, including the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, A. James Clark Hall and the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center. He has helped craft broader legislation such as the University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State, which joined UMD and the University of Maryland, Baltimore into a $1.2 billion joint research enterprise.
In her nearly 13 years as director of Dining Services, Colleen Wright-Riva has transformed the way Terps eat on campus through exceptional contributions to her department, the university and the community.
Managing more than 1,000 employees and a $70 million budget, she leads an operation that includes the student dining plans, concessions, retail and catering, and partners with deans, administrators and stakeholders across UMD.
Hoping to similarly fight food insecurity at UMD, Wright-Riva helped start the Campus Pantry, which provides emergency food to students, faculty and staff, and implemented Anytime Dining so Terps can get all they care to eat in the dining halls at times that are convenient for them. She continues to listen to students through social media, her Residence Hall Association advisory group and daily interactions.
Lisa Bot, associate clinical professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, has earned a reputation as an outstanding instructor who builds bonds with her students while never faltering in devotion to her work.
Chengquan Huang is not only an expert on satellite monitoring of land cover change for the Department of Geographical Sciences, but also a supportive teacher and mentor who promotes the well-being of his co-workers and students.
In addition to teaching advanced level courses, Huang has served on a dozen dissertation commit- tees, funded and co-advised multiple doctoral students, and hired and mentored 13 postdoctoral researchers.
He is an expert on an important type of volcanic rocks called komatiites, which largely resulted from eruptions more than 2.5 billion years ago. These rocks provide important insights into the temperature and processes that operated in the early Earth. He has also been heavily involved in the geochemistry of siderophile, or iron-loving, elements that bond with iron in the Earth and the moon, and he has been studying the characteristics of materials that resulted from the impact basin-forming events on the moon, as well as rocks that most believe came from Mars in the form of meteorites.
She started at UMD in 2002 as an adjunct lecturer in the biology department, and came back to UMD full time as the assistant director for College Park Scholars Life Sciences in 2005. She also served as assistant director for the biological sciences program before assuming her current role in the entomology department in 2014.
Students and peers praise Shofner for the passion and effort she brings to making her teaching collaborative, engaging and insightful, as well as her dedication to challenging students intellectually while treating them with respect.
In addition to his teaching duties, Walls researches, gathers and writes the specifications for Student Tech Fund proposals; as a result, the IAA was awarded $17,000 for technology improvements and innovations last year alone. Walls even assem bled and configured the equipment received.
His dedication to his students is legendary; he is well-known for working with individual students outside of class time to help them master techniques and the thinking behind them. Nearly every IAA student takes his course on agricultural mechanics, which covers electricity, plumbing, welding, woodworking, metal work and introductory GPS technology, as well as project planning, implementation and safety protocols.
Over a career of more than four decades, Steven Klees has cemented his place as one of the preeminent scholars of international and comparative education, pushing for a more equitable system worldwide while building a foundation for his own students to become leaders.
Thomas E. Murphy has pioneered influential developments in applied optics, nonlinear dynamical systems and radio over fiber technology, consistently bringing the same standard of excellence to his teaching that he does to his research.
Among his most prominent work is a seminal 2014 paper demonstrating sensitive photodetection from terahertz through visible frequencies by exploiting the photothermal effect in graphene, which has garnered more than 300 of his 5,000-plus citations across his breadth of research.
Beyond UMD, Murphy has served as an instruc- tor for Hands-On Research in Complex Systems, a two-week summer program for graduate students and young faculty from developing countries, and has been active in K-12 and STEM outreach.
Through her work in health and risk communication, Xiaoli Nan has created new ways of understanding how to effectively communicate health risks to the public, especially marginalized communities, in order to motivate risk-reduction behavior.
Specializing in the psychology of persuasion and media effects, Nan has examined how persuasive messaging is meant to change perceptions, attitudes and behavior when it comes to health risks and the impact of both traditional and new forms of media on specific public health outcomes. Her research has particularly focused on messaging to African Americans and other under-served communities about vaccination and tobacco use.
Nan earned her Ph.D. in mass communication at the University of Minnesota. She has been at the University of Maryland since 2008, and has authored or co-authored more than 70 refereed articles. She has secured funding from sources such as the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Energy, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture.
In 2018, Nan received the Mayhew Derryberry Award from the American Public Health Association for outstanding contributions to health education research and theory. She was recently named a Lewis Donohew Outstanding Health Communication Scholar, an honor conferred by the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication sponsored by the National Cancer Institute.
Her research primarily focuses on how infants and toddlers perceive and develop spoken language amid everyday background sounds. More recently, she has extended her theoretical models to explore how language acquisition in children with cochlear implants differs from normal-hearing peers, how bilingual people perceive foreign accents differently from monolinguals and what domestic dogs know about human speech.
As a leading researcher working to give swarms of autonomous airborne and ocean-going robots the ability to work together in complex environments, Derek Paley has both challenged and supported his students.
The Willis H. Young Jr. Professor of Aerospace Engineering Education, he directs the Maryland Robotics Center and the Collective Dynamics and Control Laboratory. His work focuses on cooperative control of autonomous vehicles, adaptive sampling with mobile networks and spatial modeling of biological groups like flocks of birds and schools of fish.
An impactful researcher with more than 3,600 citations, Paley is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a senior member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers. He was named 2015 Engineer of the Year by the AIAA National Capital Section and received the 2012 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering and the 2010 National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
In 1972, he founded the literary journal Hispamrica, which he continues to direct in its 49th year of continuous publication; it is recognized worldwide as one of the leading journals of Latin American literature. He has also led major international conferences and edited a publication series dedicated to exploring the repression of culture under South American dictatorships. Focusing on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, Sosnowski has studied the role of culture in re-democratization, in addition to writing about Latin American-Jewish authors and the role of Nazism and Fascism on Argentine letters.
Through his creative quantitative models, Fagan has brought new insights to the field of spatial ecology, which, among other things, allows his work to inform management of large vertebrate populations under global change. His seminal discoveries include uncovering how experience plays a role in the efficiency and operation of migrating animal groups.
Fagan earned his honors B.A. from the University of Delaware and his doctorate from the University of Washington, finished a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara and spent five years on the faculty at Arizona State. He came to UMD in 2002 and served as chair of the Department of Biology from 2013-20. For two years, he was also director for research innovation at the UMD-affiliated National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC).
One of his most important discoveries was of sulfur isotopes in Precambrian rocks, leading to key inferences about the biological processes influencing the atmosphere and driving the rise of oxygen more than 2.4 billion years ago.
Most recently, Farquhar was the lead principal investigator on a successful $1.6 million National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation proposal to acquire a high mass resolution mass spectrometer, which aims to characterize and quantify isotopic varieties of methane and to use them to characterize the sources of methane in surface environments, as well as the lifespan of this potent greenhouse gas.
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