Academe welcomes news from WSU faculty and staff about research, teaching and service activities. This column recognizes grants, honors, awards, presentations and publications, new appointments, new faculty, sabbaticals, retirements and deaths of current and former colleagues.

AWARDS/HONORS
Eric Wilson, instructor at the Elliott School of Communication, was recently named a Business Journalism Professors Seminar Fellow. He was one of the professionals chosen by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism to attend the Business Journalism Professors Seminar Jan. 2-5 in Phoenix. The seminar will be held at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Aaron Hamilton, associate director of Undergraduate Admissions, was announced as the recipient of the prestigious Richard N. Elkins Special Service Award at the annual conference of the Kansas Association for Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (KACRAO) in September. This is the organization’s highest honor, bestowed for outstanding leadership and special dedication to KACRAO. Recent past WSU winners of this award include Bill Wynne, Gina Crabtree and Diane Barnes.

Amy DeVault, assistant professor of the Elliott School of Communication, earned two awards in the National Federation of Press Women's 2013 Communications Contest: first in overall magazines and third in page design for magazine, newsletter or other non-newspaper publication.

William Groutas, distinguished professor in the Department of Chemistry at Wichita State, was one of four faculty members from three Kansas universities to be named as a recipient of the prestigious Higuchi-KU Endowment Research Achievement Award. Groutas was recognized Wednesday, Oct. 30, during a ceremony at the Lied Center of Kansas. He is known internationally for his work combating diseases such as West Nile virus, Dengue virus, Norovirus and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. For the complete story, go to http://www.wichita.edu/j/?2520.

Wilson Baldridge, professor and chair of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, is the recipient of the WSU Foundation Faculty/Staff Fundraising Award. The award recognizes WSU faculty or staff members who have played a key role in cultivating and securing a major gift for WSU. Baldridge’s longstanding friendship with John Buck and his brother, Jim, resulted in the university receiving two estate gifts from the brothers totaling $9.5 million. The legacy gifts benefit the areas of education, aerospace engineering, fine arts, business and the French program.

Marché Fleming-Randle, assistant dean of the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, received the Office of Multicultural Affairs Unity Award. This recognition is given each year to someone who supports the mission of the OMA and who has a commitment to diversity at Wichita State.

Mel Kahn, professor of political science, was recognized by the Student Government Association with an Individual Meritorious Commendation for his roles as an educator and on-campus coordinator of the WSU Washington-Topeka internship program.

Greg Meissen, professor of psychology, was presented with the John Kalafat Award in Applied Community Psychology at the American Psychological Association Community Psychology conference. The award is bestowed upon “an individual who exemplifies John Kalafat’s unique characteristics as mentor, teacher and advocate and especially his passion in making the benefits of community psychology accessible to all.”

Jay Price, professor of history, and Fletcher Powell, KMUW news producer, earned an honorable mention from the Kansas Association of Broadcasters for their collaboration, “Past and Present: Kellogg, The Lost Thoroughfare.”

Marti Smith, associate professor of the School of Community Affairs, was selected to serve on a panel to review grants for the Transportation Research Board, part of the National Research Council of the National Academies (formerly known as the National Academy of Science). She was also an invited speaker at the Safety in Transit Environments seminar at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Sam Taylor, assistant professor of English, won a first prize poetry award from the Dorothy Sergeant Rosenberg Fund for his poems “American Mystic,” “Mountain Cottage” and “First Taxi.”

Marty Perline, former Faculty Athletics Representative, has been named the Paul Morrison Award recipient in recognition of his 38 years representing WSU at the Missouri Valley Conference. Perline also served as a professor of economics and as associate dean of the School of Business Administration. Presentation of the award will take place during the Presidents Hall of Fame Breakfast at 8 a.m. Friday, March 7, at the Peabody Opera House in downtown St. Louis. For information on how to attend the event, contact Carla Fight of the Missouri Valley Conference staff, 314-444-4300.

Dan Close, associate professor of the Elliot School of Communication and Sunflower faculty adviser, won third place in the overall poetry theme category of the statewide writing contest at the Kansas Authors Club conference, Oct. 5, in Wichita.

Moriah Beck, assistant professor of chemistry, and David McDonald, professor of biological sciences, have been named National Academies Fellows in the Life Sciences for the 2012-13 academic year.

Ana Lazarin, director of Programs to Broaden Participation in Engineering, was the inaugural winner of the GEDC Airbus Diversity Award. Lazarin was selected at the Airbus and Global Engineering Deans Council convention in Chicago for her work in the university’s outreach, recruitment and retention programs, which have increased minority attendance in the College of Engineering by 91% over the last five years. In addition to a financial reward of $10,000, Lazarin will be a VIP guest of Airbus during the coming year, visiting one of their major production sites and meeting with company executives.

Pamela O’Neal, academic writing specialist, school of Nursing, has been accepted into the 2014 Kansas Leadership Assembly SPARK task team. The top 30 out of 100 nominations were chosen to join the group this year to represent their communities, schools and companies in the world of leadership. They will be responsible for planning, developing, marketing and coordinating a state-wide leadership conference to be held on April 26th, 2014 in Wichita. The conference will feature keynote speakers from around the nation, provide resources to citizens of Kansas and spark innovative social change.

Alicia Huckstadt, professor and director of graduate programs at the School of Nursing, was accepted as a mentor for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Doctoral Advancement in Nursing (DAN) program. The DAN project is designed to enhance the pipeline of future nurse leaders, faculty and researchers by using strategies to support students interested in pursuing doctoral degrees. This important work especially focuses on graduates of accelerated and traditional nursing programs who come from groups underrepresented in nursing or from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Deborah Byers, director of WSU Financial Aid, was recently installed as the President of the Rocky Mountain Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (RMASFAA) for the 2013-14 year. RMASFAA covers an eight state region (CO, KS, MT, NE, ND, SD, UT, WY) and is one of six regional associations that comprises the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). As President of RMASFAA, Byers will also serve on the NASFAA Board of Directors for the next two years.

Jeremy Hill, director of the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at the W. Frank Barton School of Business, has been elected into the presidential track of the Association for University Business and Economic Research (AUBER). This is a national professional organization established in 1947 to continually improve the quality, effectiveness and application of research in business, economics and public policy. As of October 2013, Hill finished a two-year commitment as a board member and moved into the vice president position. The presidential track is a four-year commitment that involves leading the organization’s membership committee and conference program and awards, among other duties.

Kathy Coufal, professor and chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, will serve a new three-year term with the Kansas Society for Children with Challenges, which was established in 1925.

Deanna Speer, a graduate student in the Nursing Leadership and Administration program, was named a Health Care Hero by the Wichita Business Journal. Speer joins a roster of local doctors, nurses, administrators, educators, volunteers and community groups that were honored at the Health Care Heroes event in October, along with faculty member Elaine Steinke, who was also nominated for the honor.

Ramazan Asmatulu, associate professor in the Department of Engineering, recently had his Ph.D. student win second place in the Student Poster Competition in the International SAMPE Tech Conference 2013. Madhulika Srikanth’s presentation was entitled, “Evaluating Nanosafety of Nanomaterials by In-vitro Cytotoxicity tests on Fibroblast Cells.”

Ken Ward, a graduate student of assistant professor Lisa Parcell at the Elliott School of Communication, recently won the top student paper award from the American Journalism Historians Association at its annual convention in New Orleans.

GRANTS
Jim Snyder, professor of psychology, procured a National Institutes of Health grant that will fund research to assess the impact of military service members’ deployment on post-deployment family interaction, and on service members’, spouses’ and children's adjustments. Snyder also recently accepted an invitation to serve as a member of the Psychosocial Development, Risk and Prevention Study Section, Center for Scientific Review under the National Institutes of Health.

PRESENTATIONS
Tina Bennett, professor of English, gave an invited paper, “Code- and Script-Switching in Written Language,” at the Code-Switching in Literature Conference, University of London, Birkbeck.

Michael Birzer, professor and director of the School of Community Affairs, was the keynote speaker at the Northern Oklahoma/Southern Kansas Peace Officers Association’s quarterly meeting. Birzer has also been invited by the Kansas African American Museum to participate on a panel discussion about the Prison Industrial Complex, the dramatic growth of the U.S. prison system that disproportionally impacts poor and minority populations.

Karen Countryman-Roswurm, assistant professor of social work and director of the Center for Combatting Human Trafficking, was an invited speaker at the Cambridge University TEDx event in the United Kingdom.

Following a refereed, blind-reviewed paper competition with a 50 percent acceptance rate, two Elliott School of Communication faculty presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference. Amy DeVault, assistant professor, presented “Grab a Team, Mob Report: Using a Team Storytelling Approach for a Multimedia Journalism Experience,” and also was an invited panelist for the magazine and visual communication divisions’ joint panel, “The Ideal Visual Curriculum.” Madeline McCullough, an ESC lecturer, presented “Tweeting in Haikus/Teaches Brevity and Rhythm/to IMC Class.”

Nancy Krehbiel and Rebecca Rawls Croskey’s joint presentation, “iAdvise: Strategies for implementing a Paperless Advising Workflow,” earned the designation of “best of the best” at the Kansas Academic Advising Network conference. They will make a return presentation to the February regional meeting in St. Louis. Both are academic advisors in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Advising Center.

Eunice Doman Myers, associate dean of the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and associate professor of Spanish, presented the paper, “Cyborg Feminism in Rosa Montero’s Lagrimas en la lluvia,” at the annual meeting of the Asociacion Internacional de Literatura y Cultural Hispanicas Femeninas, Oct. 12, 2013, Claremont, Calif.

Elliott School of Communication’s Dan Close, associate professor and Sunflower faculty adviser, gave a presentation on mentoring/critiquing for fiction and non-fiction writers at the statewide Kansas Authors Club conference Oct. 5 in Wichita.

Ashlie Jack, assistant professor of literacy, and Mandy Lusk, assistant professor of special education, received funding for their study “Developing Word Consciousness of Academic Vocabulary in Adolescents with Challenging Behaviors through Co-Teaching” conducted during the spring 2013 semester. They recently presented their results at Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders International Conference with a paper titled “Developing Word Consciousness of Academic Vocabulary in Adolescents with Challenging Behaviors through Co-teaching” and at the Kansas Reading Association Annual State Conference in a paper titled “Co-Teaching: A Collaborative Approach in Addressing the Academic Vocabulary English Language Arts and Literacy Shift.” They also currently have two articles in review based on this study.

PUBLICATIONS
Josh Barkan, assistant professor of English, had a work, “The American Chef and El Chapo,” named to the Top 25 story list by Glimmer Train magazine.

Albert Goldbarth, Adele M. Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities, English, recently wrote “The End of Space,” a chapbook nominated for a Midwest Booksellers Association Award.

ESC Director Matthew Cecil’s new book, “Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate,” is in press now and will have an official release date soon.

NEW APPOINTMENTS
Elizabeth King, president and CEO of the Wichita State University Foundation, has been appointed to a four-year term on the board of directors of the University of Kansas Hospital Authority, the public oversight body that governs the operations of the hospital at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

Doris Chang, associate professor at the Center for Women’s Studies, will serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Gender and Power, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, Poznan, Poland.

Kerry Wilks, associate professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, has been named associate dean of the Graduate School.

MISCELLANEOUS

“Take Us Home,” a documentary directed by KMUW News Director Aileen LeBlanc, was shown twice during the Tallgrass Film Oct. 18-20. It was also the documentary winner at the Hollywood Black Film Festival. Click for information about the documentary.

IN MEMORIAM
The Shocker Nation lost one of its longest and most loyal fans, Dorothy C. Miller, on Nov. 11, 2013, at the age of 88. Dottie was an avid Shocker fan for more than 60 years, and was an active Shocker athletics supporter. Her loyalty began when Ralph (brother-in-law) and Richard (husband) began coaching basketball at Wichita State University in 1951. After their tenure, Dottie continued her support and was a longtime season ticket holder. In addition, her involvement with WSU continued as she was employed at the university in the Student Services Office for 25 years. Dottie is survived by her children, Steve Miller, Jane Miller Stephens and Carol Miller Lewis; seven grandchildren and two great grandsons. In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to the WSU Foundation, Ralph and Richard Miller Endowed Scholarship Fund #610924, 1845 Fairmount, Box #2, Wichita, KS 67260. Private family services have been held. Send condolences via MyLakeviewFuneralHome.com.

Gary H. Toops, 59, died Monday, Oct. 14, 2013, from complications caused by lymphoma. A professor in the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures department since 1989, Toops taught Russian and linguistics. A memorial service was held Saturday, Oct. 26, in Grace Memorial Chapel.

Audrey Needles, 93, emeritus professor of theater from February 1965 to August 1990, died Friday, Oct. 18, 2013. A memorial service was held Sunday, Oct. 27, at Mosley Street Melodrama. In lieu of flowers, the Audrey Needles Memorial for the Audrey Needles Scholarship Fund has been established with the WSU Foundation. Arrangements through Downing & Lahey Mortuary East.

Morita Matthews Crymes Bateman, 87, a professor of business and faculty member in Financial, Real Estate and Decision Science, died Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013. She worked at Wichita State from October 1965 to May 1997 before retiring to a life of reading and conversation. Survivors include son, Wm. A. Courtenay Bateman III; daughter, Morita C. Bruce; two granddaughters. She will be inurned in Magnolia Cemetery, Greenwood, S.C.

COLLEGE COLLABORATIONS
The College of Engineering in collaboration with WSU TRIO Upward Bound, Office of Admissions, Financial Aid, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) hosted the Changing Faces of Engineering event on Oct. 5. More than 150 students and parents from several Kansas TRIO Upward Bound programs participated in the event, which offered workshops, hands-on activities and lab tours to encourage students to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).