A Celebration of Excellence

The 16th Annual Faculty Excellence Awards

UALR Honors Faculty Excellence at 16th Annual Awards Ceremony

View Video - Requires Quicktime 6

Walter Steve Anderson, a professor of English in UALR’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, won the $10,000 Ted and Virginia Bailey Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching at the University’s 16th Annual Faculty Excellence Awards ceremony on April 30.

Wei Zhao, associate professor of chemistry in the College of Science and Mathematics, won the $5,000 University Faculty Excellence Award for Research sponsored by PepsiAmericas, and Johanna Miller Lewis, professor of history in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, won the $5,000 University Faculty Excellence Award for Public Service sponsored by Bank of America.

The awards were announced at the annual Celebration of Excellence banquet – UALR’s premier event honoring the University’s outstanding faculty – at the Donaghey Student Center.

Awards of $1,000 each went to 20 faculty members, including the three big winners, all of whom had previously been selected by their peers as college-level winners for excellence in teaching, research, and public service.

A national panel of judges selected the three big winners.

Dr. Anderson,who received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia, has used his position as department chair to develop new curriculum and courses, including a popular minor in film studies, and courses on literature and films of the Vietnam War. One former student credits Dr. Anderson with his own success as a student, writer, and teacher and says Dr. Anderson opens his students’ minds to a wide variety of literary material and invokes a love for the written word.

A UALR teacher for more than 20 years, Professor Anderson has co-edited two editions of The Technical Reader, one of the first books in the country to establish the framework for teaching the emerging discipline of technical writing. He has published numerous essays in scholarly journals on teaching, curriculum development, and consulting.

Dr. Zhao, who received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Peking University, is an internationally-known analytical chemist who collaborates with colleagues worldwide on a variety of research projects. His most recent research focuses on nanotechnology – the science and technology of building electronic circuits and devices from single atoms and molecules.

In his five years at UALR, Dr. Zhao has received major external funding from the Research Corp., the Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, and the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program. His research grants allowed him to set up a laser spectroscopy laboratory, making UALR one of only a few universities worldwide with this state-of-the-art technology for analysis of new materials in a multidimensional setting.

Dr. Lewis, professor and chair of the Department of History in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, won the Public Service Award for her work on a variety of projects that supporters say made history come alive for the community. Her leadership in creating the Central High Museum, which in 1999 became the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, helped Little Rock and the nation focus on the heroism of the nine African-American students who broke the color barrier at Central High in 1957.

Professor Lewis, who received her Ph.D. in early American history from the College of William and Mary, recently has brought national attention to UALR with Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in World War II Arkansas. The project tells the story of Japanese Americans incarcerated in Arkansas war relocation camps at Jerome and Rohwer during World War II. The project will culminate this fall in a national conference in Little Rock expected to draw thousands, including many well-known Japanese Americans whose families were touched by the camps.

In addition to her projects, Dr. Lewis also brings history to the public through a special community classroom series including The Civil War in Contemporary America: Searching for Common History , which she co-designed and taught last fall, and this semester’s Brown vs. Board of Education in Arkansas.