UNO Alumni Association honors nine faculty
in 25th year of outstanding teaching award
(OMAHA, NE) — The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Alumni Association celebrates the 25th year of its Alumni Outstanding Teaching Award program when it presents the honor to nine faculty members during the UNO Faculty Honors Convocation Oct. 14.
The awards were established in 1997 to honor distinguished teaching in the classroom. Peer committees in UNO colleges chose recipients, each of whom receives a $1,000 award and commemorative plaque. With the 2021 awards the association will have issued $221,000 through the program. Synopses of recipients follow below.
2021 UNO Alumni Outstanding Teaching Award Recipients
Samantha Ammons, Sociology & Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences
Jodi Benenson, School of Public Administration, College of Public Affairs & Community Service
Abby L Bjornsen-Ramig, Counseling, Education, College of Health and Human Sciences
Robert Darcy, English, College of Arts and Sciences
Paul Davis, Biology, College of Arts and Sciences
Seunghee Kim, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering
Briana Baker Morrison, Computer Science, College of Information Science & Technology
Hugh Reilly, School of Communication, Communication, College of Fine Arts and Media
Jamie Wagner, Economics, College of Business Administration
Samantha Ammons
Associate professor Sam Ammons is a work-family sociologist specializing in the boundaries between work, family and leisure domains. Her intellectual expertise is reflected in her course topics: the work-family intersection, labor studies, gender and research methodologies. Her teaching publications focus on the integration of research within various courses. Recent student collaborations investigated what leads undergraduates to pursue research, and a material culture analysis of “Lost and Found” items that provided insight on the UNO experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, she serves as an advisor for the department, and a faculty sponsor of the UNO Sociology Club.
Jodi Benenson
Jodi Benenson’s teaching and research interests include civic engagement, nonprofit organizations, social policy and social equity. As an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration, she incorporates service-learning and other civically engaged pedagogies into her teaching and serves on dissertation and thesis committees throughout the university. She also serves as the academic director for the U.S. Department of State’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Institute on Civic Engagement, and she has published community-engaged teaching and research in venues such as the Journal of Public Affairs Education, the Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, and the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership.
Abby L Bjornsen-Ramig
An associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Abby Bjornsen-Ramig’s research interests include career development and wellness in college students and student-athletes. She has published numerous manuscripts in this area, examining the career transitions of student-athletes and graduate student attitudes toward career counseling. She also teaches Work and Wellness and supervises advanced graduate students in their practicum and internship semesters. Bjornsen-Ramig serves as the Clinical Coordinator for the Community Counseling Clinic in Roskens Hall, training counselors to serve a diverse client population from the UNO campus and Omaha metropolitan community.
Robert Darcy
Darcy is a teacher of freshman composition, sophomore literature surveys, and upper-division courses for English majors and master’s degree students. He has taught such courses as Sixteenth-Century Satire, the Heuristics and Hermeneutics of the Poem, Ancient Greek and Roman Drama, Spenser and Milton, Critical Theory, and Renaissance Lyric. He has published a one-week unit for teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets in SMART: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching.
Paul Davis
Paul Davis formed UNO’s Health Careers Resource Center in 2016 to provide career advising to more than 2,000 pre-health students at UNO. He also directs the UNO/UNMC Urban Health Opportunities Program (UHOP), a student pipeline designed to increase the diversity of healthcare providers in urban areas of Nebraska, as well as several other federally funded scholarship and fellowship programs. In addition, he leads a successful infectious diseases research laboratory where mentored undergraduate students have gone onto top research institutes, and have received national research scholarships, such as the Goldwater and Fulbright awards.
Seunghee Kim
Assistant professor Seunghee Kim’s primary teaching focus is geotechnical engineering, one of the sub-disciplines within Civil and Environmental Engineering. Kim offers various undergraduate and graduate courses that address traditional topics in the field of geotechnical engineering and emerging and novel topics related to energy, environmental and sustainability issues. His main research area includes the pore-scale study of reactive/multiphase fluid flow in porous media, hydro-chemo-thermo-mechanically coupled processes in energy-geotechnics, and underground utilization. These topics tackle challenges for the success of many energy/environmental operations, such as carbon utilization & geologic storage, geo-energy storage, and nuclear waste sequestration.
Briana Baker Morrison
Assistant professor Briana B. Morrison’s research interests are computer science education and broadening participation in computing. As a member of the Computer Science department, she has worked to re-design the introductory programming sequence of courses to utilize active learning components to improve student learning outcomes. She also teaches in the Masters of Computer Science Education program, helping prepare K-12 teachers to incorporate inclusive pedagogy and evidence-based teaching practices into the computing classroom.
Hugh Reilly
Hugh Reilly, who retired in 2021, had a primary teaching focus of advertising and public relations. He also taught several journalism writing courses and two speech courses. During his 22 years at UNO he taught 19 different courses. His research focused on advertising and PR issues. He also published extensively on the history of frontier newspapers. He led several student groups to Ireland and England. While director of UNO’s School of Communication, he participated, along with several other Communication faculty, in a State Department grant working with Afghan professors to help launch Communications Studies programs at two Afghan Universities.
Jamie Wagner
Jamie Wagner is an associate professor of Economics and director of UNO’s Center for Economic Education. She teaches undergraduate economics courses using the economic way of thinking to make the classroom content applicable to students. She also directs the Center for Economic Education, working with pre-service and K-12 teachers in the Omaha area to assist economic and personal finance instruction through professional development workshops, curriculum development, and one-on-one work with teachers. Wagner’s research interests include economic education, economic pedagogy, and financial literacy. Her research has been published in the Journal for Economic Education, the Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning among other journals. She is a dynamic speaker who demonstrates economic and financial literacy concepts through interactive activities, including simulations, discussions and games.