Nine faculty honored in 23rd year of teaching award
The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Alumni Association celebrated the 23rd year of its Alumni Outstanding Teaching Award program when it presented the honor to nine faculty members during the UNO Faculty Honors Convocation Thursday, April 11. Association President Lee Denker presented the awards, established in 1997 to honor distinguished teaching in the classroom.
Peer committees in UNO colleges chose recipients, each of whom received a $1,000 award and commemorative plaque. With the 2019 awards the association has issued $203,000 through the program. Synopses of recipients follow.
Recipients
Ashlee Dere, Geography/Geology, College of Arts & Sciences
Shari DeVeney, Special Education & Communication Disorders, College of Education
Ramón Guerra, English, College of Arts & Sciences
Matthew Hale, Interdisciplinary Informatics, College of Information Science & Technology
Jillian Poyzer, Accounting, College of Business Administration
Todd Richardson, Goodrich Scholarship ProgramPublic Affairs & Community Service
Chungwook Sim, Civil Engineering, UNL College of Engineering
Paige Toller, School of Communication, College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media
Laura Walls, Foreign Languages, College of Arts & Sciences
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Ashlee Dere, Geography/Geology
An assistant professor, Ashlee Dere’s research focuses on soils within the critical zone, primarily investigating how variables such as climate and geology control weathering rates and soil formation and how intensive agricultural land use influences soil and solute geochemistry. Her research on weathering and soil formation includes field sites in the Appalachian Mountains, Wales, Puerto Rico, Alaska, Australia and Italy. Her studies of land use are centered at UNO’s Glacier Creek Preserve and the Intensively Managed Landscapes Critical Zone Observatory in eastern Iowa. Dere also studies ways to incorporate critical zone science and research into undergraduate and high school classrooms. She joined the UNO faculty in 2014.
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Shari L. DeVeney, Special Education & Communication Disorders
Shari DeVeney’s principal academic focus is speech-language pathology, for which she teaches coursework at the undergraduate and graduate level. DeVeney teaches courses related to: speech sound production and disorders; language and reading disorders; fluency disorders; augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems; and, research methods in communication sciences and disorders. Her primary area of research involves early communication skills and related behaviors of infants and toddlers at risk for delay in speech-language acquisition, work that informs her teaching and classroom interactions.
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Ramón Guerra, English
Ramón Guerra's primary teaching and research focus is situating Latino/a Literature within American Literature, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. Also a member of the Office of Latino/a and Latin American Studies faculty, Guerra offers courses to undergraduate and graduate students that examine Latino/a Literature and cultures through fiction, poetry, oral history, memoir, testimony and more. An associate professor, he also teaches courses in American Literature that focus on the post-WWII era up to the present. He has published works on Latinos and the American Dream; early 20th century Mexican American writer Américo Paredes; contemporary Latina writer Sandra Cisneros; Latino Documentary Films; and, Mexican American Realism Writing. He has taught at UNO since 2006.
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Matt Hale, Cybersecurity
An assistant professor, Matthew Hale’s research interests lie at the intersection of security and software engineering with specific focuses on building and testing secure web services, mobile applications, wearables and combatting human-centric social engineering problems. He joined UNO in 2014 and has won several competitive research grants to investigate attack vectors in hybrid mobile applications; to identify and mitigate consumer-wearable security issues in the internet of things, and to conduct cybersecurity STEM outreach events. A current research project, CyberTrust, focuses on exploring the psychology of phishing, identifying behavioral and structural antecedents of trust, and providing targeted personalized training to prevent future victimization.
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Jillian K Poyzer, Accounting
Jillian Poyzer’s primary teaching focus is taxation, mainly federal income tax at the individual and business entity level. Her classes are at the introductory, intermediate and advanced level. Beyond teaching technical knowledge in the classroom, Poyzer also assists and mentors students in professional development to help set them up for success as they transition from student to accounting professional. Because of this she created and leads the Accounting Careers Program as the Accounting Career Advisor and is the College of Business Administration’s accounting internship coordinator. She has taught at UNO since 2011
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Todd Richardson, Goodrich Scholarship Program
Todd Richardson teaches in the Goodrich Scholarship Program, which provides full tuition scholarships and a rigorous curriculum to high-achieving Nebraska residents who might not otherwise be able to afford college. In his classes, Richardson emphasizes creative citizenship, which attempts to preserve the best elements of our cultural inheritance while encouraging students to create new cultural possibilities. His expertise is in American literature and folklore, and he teaches courses focusing on nostalgia, ghost stories and ghostlore, and loneliness in contemporary American culture. An associate professor, he joined UNO’s faculty in 2011.
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Chungwook Sim, Civil Engineering
Chungwook Sim is an assistant professor in the department of Civil Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He directs the Large-Scale Structures Laboratory at the Peter Kiewit Institute on UNO’s campus and has taught reinforced concrete design I and II, foundation engineering, and seismic design at UNO since 2015. Sim’s research focus includes modeling and testing of structural concrete; health monitoring of aging infrastructures; and, development of data repositories for multi-hazards. Sim also is the faculty advisor for the American Society of Civil Engineers Student Chapter at UNO.
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Paige Toller, School of Communication
Paige Toller is an associate professor and the assistant director of UNO’s School of Communication. She has taught at UNO since 2006, doing so at the undergraduate and graduate level. That includes courses on qualitative methods, health communication, speech communication in business and the professions, interpersonal communication and more. Toller’s research interests are bereavement, parental grief, and end-of-life communication. She has published articles in Communication Studies, the Journal of Applied Communication Research, the Journal of Family Communication, Sex Roles, and the Southern Communication Journal. She also is on the editorial board for the Journal of Applied Communication Research and for the Southern Communication Journal.
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Laura Walls, Foreign Languages
Laura Walls is an assistant professor who teaches courses in composition, bilingualism, sociolinguistics and heritage language pedagogy. She teaches at the undergraduate and graduate level. Walls also has taught a study abroad course and developed the Spanish heritage language series at UNO. Her scholarship bridges the fields of sociolinguistics, second language acquisition and heritage language pedagogy. She also is an affiliated faculty member of the Office of Latino/Latina American Studies at UNO. She joined UNO’s faculty in 2013.
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