Six staff and faculty members in Cornell's statutory colleges are among 194 classroom teachers, librarians and professional service staff in the State University of New York system who have been cited for excellence in the performance of their duties and named winners of Chancellor's Awards for Excellence.
SUNY Chancellor Thomas A. Bartlett recently announced the names of the winners from 59 SUNY-affiliated campuses, commending the recipients for dedication and contributions to their fields. The awards program was created 26 years ago to honor distinguished performance within the state university system. The SUNY Advisory Committee on Awards makes recommendations and reviews the nominations submitted by campus presidents throughout the 64-campus system.
Each recipient will receive an inscribed certificate and a cast bronze medallion. Here are the award winners from Cornell for 1996:
·Alan Mathios, associate professor of consumer economics and housing in the College of Human Ecology and former economist at the Federal Trade Commission, has won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. Mathios, who came to Cornell in 1992, teaches courses on the economics of consumer law and on consumer information and government regulation. He also serves as the undergraduate advising coordinator for the consumer economics and housing major and the policy analysis major in the college.
·Brenda Bricker won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Professional Service. She came to Cornell in 1970 and has been director of admissions in the College of Human Ecology since 1979. While at the helm, applications to the college have doubled, and the diversity and academic qualifications of the classes have become much greater. In 1995-96, the college enrolled 400 students from 1,764 applications.
·George W. Hudler, associate professor of plant pathology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He created a course, "Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds," to expose students to the diversity of microorganisms that interact with plants. He makes the subject matter come alive to students as he leads them to recognize how microorganisms have impacted social and political structure throughout the course of history. The course has the distinction of having been featured in Rolling Stone magazine.
·George J. Conneman, professor emeritus of agricultural, resource and managerial economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He stresses cooperative learning among students by creating teams to work on class projects and by using role-playing activities in class. He won the award based on his special way of taking complex principles and linking them with real-world situations. From 1981 to 1994, he served as associate dean of academic programs. He also developed faculty and teaching assistantship workshops, and he initiated the Thornfield Experience, an annual faculty teaching development retreat.
·Janet A. McCue, head of the Technical Services Division of the Albert R. Mann Library, has won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Librarianship, because she has helped lead the College of Agriculture and Life Science's library to the forefront of technology. She has changed processing from manual to computerized operations, decreasing processing time dramatically. She created a list of new books on the World Wide Web, which was one of the first of its kind, receiving local and national attention from other librarians who wanted to initiate similar lists at their institutions. Last year she was recognized nationally as one of the pioneers who developed technical services workstations, where dictionaries, thesauri and handbooks are available in electronic form at the desktop.
·Richard A. Church, director of alumni affairs for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a recipient of a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Professional Service, has impacted Cornell by directing two offices in the college during his career. For many years, he directed the admission of undergraduate students into the college, and each year, the college has been able to boast that about 80 to 85 percent of its incoming students were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, academically. He now directs the college's Office of Alumni Affairs. He coordinates many functions for alumni, including the recent development of workshops to promote life-long learning.