Drs. Gary Geissler, Adjoa Aiyetoro, and Shucheng Yu have been named the top faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

The three professors were named the recipients of the 2016 Faculty Excellence Awards in the categories of teaching, public service, and research and creative endeavors at a ceremony held April 14 at the UALR George W. Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology.

UALR colleges nominated a faculty member in each of the three categories, and an independent selection committee chose the three university-wide winners.

Geissler, a professor of marketing and advertising, will receive a $10,000 award from the Bailey Foundation as the winner of the Bailey Teaching Award.

Aiyetoro, a professor of law, received the award for Faculty Excellence in Public Service, and Yu, an assistant professor of computer science, garnered the Faculty Excellence in Research award. They each will receive $5,000.

Since 1988, the Faculty Excellence Awards have provided a way to recognize outstanding UALR faculty. The awards program is made possible through the contributions of the Bailey Foundation, Pepsi Beverages Co., and the UALR Chancellor’s Circle.

More information about the winners:

Dr. Gary Geissler is known for his learning-centered approach that focuses on utilizing the most effective teaching tools, techniques, and technology. He has taught more than 20 different marketing and advertising courses.

His teaching method includes the client-based class project. To date, he has directed more than 150 of these semester-long projects, greatly benefitting thousands of students and well over 100 businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Besides his client-based project teaching method, Geissler has also demonstrated his teaching quality by mentoring and sponsoring student teams in marketing competitions.

Geissler has a bachelor’s degree in general business administration and a master’s degree in business administration from Louisiana State University-Shreveport and a doctorate in marketing from the University of Georgia.

Dr. Adjoa Aiyetoro has been a leading voice in ending racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Her public service centers on researching and resolving racism and its effects in the United States, particularly raising awareness of the need for racial justice.

In 2011, she served as the inaugural director of UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity. As director of the Racial Disparities in the Arkansas Criminal Justice System Research Project, Aiyetoro developed a team and began researching records of hundreds of Arkansas prisoners to determine the reasons for significant racial disparities within the state’s criminal justice system. Aiyetoro’s
 work on this project resulted in a conference in August 2015 sponsored by
 the Racial Disparities Project’s Steering Committee and has contributed to legislation to obtain support for racial impact. She has also worked as a board member of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Aiyetoro has a bachelor’s degree from Clark University, a master’s degree in social work from Washington University, and a juris doctor from Saint Louis University.

Dr. Shucheng Yu’s main research areas include data security, privacy in cloud computing, applied cryptography, and wireless network security. His most influential work, “Achieving 
Secure, Stable, and Fine-grained Data Access
 Control in Cloud Computing,” represents
 a milestone in the field of cloud computing 
security and has been cited over 1,000
 times. In the past five
 years, Yu and his graduate students 
published 37 research articles.

Yu has also been awarded six grants that total more than $1 million. In his National Science Foundation-funded grant, “MRI: Acquisition of a Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Research and Education,” Yu successfully built the first private cloud in the state 
of Arkansas. This cloud has served as a critical platform for researchers as well as others outside
 the university on various research and education projects.

Yu has a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.