Teaching and research excellence celebrated at Faculty Recognition Night
Several members of UPEI's faculty were honoured at the ‘Faculty Recognition Night' which was held recently in Stanhope. The annual reception and banquet, co-sponsored by the UPEI Faculty Association and the Office of the President, recognizes teaching and research excellence. It is also an opportunity to honour the service of retiring academic staff as well as to recognize those who have served UPEI for 25 years or more.
This year, three faculty members were recognized for their outstanding achievements as researchers. Sanda Badescu, Modern Languages, Faculty of Arts; and co-winners from the Faculty of Science, Rabin Bissessur, Chemistry, and Lori Weeks, Family & Nutritional Sciences each received a UPEI Faculty Association Merit Award for Scholarly Achievement. These awards honour faculty members who have achieved significant and continuing productivity in scholarly research and/or artistic creation, and in so doing, inspire others to aspire to such achievement.
Dr. Gerry Mahar, UPEI President Wade MacLauchlan, and Dean of Science Dr. Christian Lacroix, far right, are shown with Scholarly Achievement Merit Award winners Dr. Lori Weeks, Dr. Rabin Bissessur, and Dr. Sanda Badescu. Four faculty members were recognized for their outstanding performance in teaching. Shelley Burton, Pathology/Microbiology; Wendy Carroll, School of Business; Marva Sweeney-Nixon, Biology; and Earlene McKinnon-Gray, Family & Nutritional Sciences (Sessional Teaching Award), each received a Hessian Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching. The awards are supported through an endowment to the University by the Hessian family of Georgetown.
James Miller, Companion Animals and Lowell Sweet, Mathematics/Statistics were both recognized for their years of service to the University as both have recently retired.
Luis Bate, Biomedical Sciences; Gerry Johnston, Pathology/Microbiology; Fred Markham, Pathology/Microbiology; Mary McNiven, Health Management; Thomy Nilsson, Psychology; Caroline Runyon, Companion Animals; David Sims, Biomedical Sciences; and Carmencita Yason, Pathology/Microbiology received pins in recognition of 25 years of service to UPEI.
About the Scholarly Achievement Merit Awards Winners
Dr. Sanda Badescu received her BSc in Physics in 1993 and BA in French and English in 1997 from the University of the West in Timisoara, Romania. She received her MA in Comparative Literature in 1999 and PhD in French in 2003 from the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. She joined UPEI in the Faculty of Arts in the Department of Modern Languages in 2003. Since joining UPEI, Dr. Badescu has been very active, presenting papers, organizing conferences and publishing, and very successful in applying for internal research grants. She has written one book: Madame de Sévigné et Michel de Montaigne: l'écriture intime à la lettre et à l'essai (The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York, 2008) and was editor of another book 'From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge' (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), a collection of essays from the proceedings of the bilingual conference entitled 'The Sea, The Land, The Bridge: (Hi)Stories of Communication' held at UPEI in August 2005. Dr. Badescu wrote the introduction 'On the Symbolism of the Bridge' to this book. From 2008 to 2009, Dr. Badescu served on the Language Laboratory Committee, which created a modern languages laboratory in the Robertson Library at UPEI.
Dr. Lori Weeks received her BSc in Home Economics from UPEI in 1991, MSc in Human Development from the University of Maine in 1994, and PhD in Adult Development and Aging and a Graduate Certificate in Gerontology from Virginia Tech in 1998. She was full-time administrator of Rosewood Residence Licensed Community Care Facility in Hunter River prior to joining the faculty at UPEI in the Department of Family and Nutritional Sciences in 2001. She is considered a national leader in gerontology research. Over the past several years, she has successfully written grants and fostered a number of local and international collaborations to support her research program, and currently holds just under $1 million in research funding. She publishes profusely; 10 refereed manuscripts and 17 abstracts or conference presentations in the last 5 years. Dr. Weeks has served on the UPEI Research Ethics Board since 2005, and became chair in 2008. She is also a valued mentor of students, having supervised or co-supervised 4 graduate students and 14 BSc honours undergraduate students. Lori also provides her expertise to the PEI Department of Health and Wellness, and currently serves on the Provincial Dementia Strategy Steering Committee.
Dr. Rabin Bissessur received his BSc (Honours) in Chemistry from University of Manitoba in 1987, MSc in organic chemistry from University of Rochester in 1989, and PhD in Chemistry with specialization in Materials Synthesis and Physical/Chemical Characterization from Michigan State University in 1994. He was a Research Fellow at Northwestern University, Lecturer at University of Mauritius, Research Associate at Laval University, and then Instructor at University of Northern British Columbia, prior to joining the faculty at UPEI in 1999. Bissessur is currently acting chair of the Department of Chemistry. This is his second win of the Merit Award for Scholarly Achievement; the first was in 2003. Since then, Bissessur's research productivity has if anything increased, further enhancing his national and international reputation in the field of nanocomposite materials. He has been NSERC-funded since 2002, collaborates extensively, and has been extremely successful in obtaining infrastructure grants from CFI, AIF and NSERC. He has also been funded by Innovation PEI and has received several internal research grants. He currently serves as the NSERC Scholarship Liaison Officer for UPEI. Since 2003, he has published 28 peer-reviewed papers and two book chapters, and 36 abstracts or conference presentations. Dr. Bissessur is also very active in the training of highly qualified personnel, including 17 summer undergraduate research students, 4th year research projects of 16 undergraduate students (11 Honours and 5 Majors), and 5 MSc graduate students. Rabin has equally excelled in teaching and was a winner of the Hessian Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007, and this year's winner of the UPEI Student Union Faculty of the Year Award in recognition for excellence in teaching.
About the UPEI Hessian Merit Award Winners
Dr. Shelley Burton has already been recognized as one of the outstanding teachers in the Atlantic Veterinary College with seven AVC teaching awards. She is an expert clinical pathologist, and teaches the subject in a lecture and laboratory course for second-year veterinary students, and in fourth-year clinical rotations. She is also heavily involved in the supervision and training of graduate students, and in the delivery of continuing education sessions for veterinary practitioners and pathologists regionally, nationally and internationally. Her students clearly appreciate the effort and enthusiasm Dr. Burton brings to her teaching.
Dr. Wendy Carroll has been teaching management at the undergraduate and MBA level in the UPEI School of Business since 2008, and appears to have come with a mission - closing the 'rigour -relevance gap'. In addition, and equally importantly, she is completely dedicated to her teaching and to her students. Carroll received the UPEI Graduate Student Faculty Member of the Year Award in 2008 and 2009, after being nominated by the MBA students.
Dr. Marva Sweeney-Nixon, in addition to leading an active research group in the Department of Biology, has a well-deserved reputation as an outstanding teacher. Sweeney-Nixon teaches two very demanding and high-enrolment core courses in the Biology program, as well as two senior courses in her specialty. She is unique in the department in that she insists on personally teaching all the labs (up to 3 per week) and tutorials (6 per week) in these courses, something that is very important to her since the small-group contact allows her to get to know all her students, and identify early any problems they are having.
Earlene MacKinnon-Gray has taught several Family Science courses, and her contributions are highly valued by the department. One of the courses she teaches is Family Science 491-Human Sexuality for which she has single-handedly maintained the required curriculum standards and kept the course up-to-date since she took it on in 2004. In teaching the course, and in dealing with a subject matter that is rather uncomfortable for some students, MacKinnon-Gray has based her teaching practice on the belief that, as she puts it, 'An active supportive environment-based on mutual respect, inquiry, support, and excitement-must be developed. Within this environment we all can learn from and with each other.'
