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Awards & Honors

Five 2006 Academic Showcase Faculty Award Winners Announced

Friday, Feb. 2, 2007

Robert Strenge, WSU News Service, 509/335-3583, rstrenge@wsu.edu

PULLMAN, Wash. – Five faculty members were named recipients this week of awards given out each spring by Washington State University in recognition of excellence in academic achievement.

All five will be honored publicly March 23 as part of the WSU World Class Face to Face Showcase, which celebrates the achievements of WSU faculty and staff.

Kimberlee Kidwell, WSU professor and scientist in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, received the 2006 Marian E. Smith Faculty Achievement Award. The $5,000 award recognizes unusually significant and meritorious achievement in teaching during the academic year, including successful and innovative performance in instruction.

Kidwell conducts basic and biotechnology research in wheat genetics and since 1998 has introduced eight spring wheat varieties that have had a major impact on Washington’s agriculture.

Her talents have also shown in another realm as she has volunteered to teach a course in the WSU Department of Human Development called Communication in Human Relations. The course has soared in popularity, climbing from 93 students to more than 400 students in two years.

Eugene A. Rosa, professor in the WSU Department of Sociology, was named to deliver the 2007 Distinguished Faculty Address during the March 23 Showcase luncheon. The honor carries a $2,500 award and recognizes the work of a faculty member whose achievements in research, scholarship and teaching place that person in the front ranks of his or her discipline.

Rosa is a world-renowned environmental scholar and international leader in multidisciplinary work assessing how the U.S. and other countries contribute to environmental impacts and how they attempt to resolve social risk associated with environmental change.

Through his research, policy work and teaching, he has changed how people everywhere view environmental impacts and their consequences. His work warns of the risks emanating from various societal concerns ranging from nuclear power to global warming.

Three faculty members were named to receive 2006-07 Sahlin Faculty Excellence Awards, a trio of honors recognizing excellence in instruction, public service, and in research, scholarship and arts. Each will receive $3,000.

Duane W. DeTemple, professor in the WSU Department of Mathematics and faculty member in the Honors College, received the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction for 36 years of sharing his time and love of problem-solving with his students.

DeTemple has been eager to enhance learning by presenting mathematics in ways that engage women and others who have been “turned off” or told they could not succeed in understanding mathematics. His efforts to present concepts in new and interesting ways have reached a wide audience in the form of many scholarly papers, presentations at symposia, handbooks and textbooks.

His contribution is reflected by the enthusiasm of many current students and the former students who attribute their own successes as teachers to his inspiration.

J. Daniel Dolan, professor of structural engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of codes and standards for the Wood Materials & Engineering Laboratory, earned the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Public Service for leading WSU's efforts to improve building codes and design standards to make low-rise buildings safer to the public.

Dolan helped write the U.S. residential building code and has been one of nine voting members of the technical update committee for this code since 2000. The code sets performance standards for all single-family houses, duplexes and townhouses in the United States.

The scope and excellence of his program is enhanced by his active work with Engineers Without Borders. He advised student teams as they designed replacements for two school buildings destroyed by the tsunami in Sri Lanka, a well as a water supply system in a remote area of the Yakama Nation and a hospital building in Sudan.

Lai-Sheng Wang, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Program in Materials Science, WSU Tri-Cities, received the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Research, Scholarship and Arts.

He is a world leader in nanoclusters research. With his graduate students and colleagues, Wang created hollow nanoscale cages of gold atoms, the first known metallic equivalent of the buckyball.

Wang showed that the most stable form of gold clusters undergoes shape transformations, a finding that addressed a key issue in fundamental cluster science: understanding the structural evolution of clusters from a single atom/molecule towards the bulk solid. The work also has potential applications in energy science.

During his 20 years in research, Wang has written or co-written more than 250 publications. His work has been featured in top journals, including “Science and Nature,” and has been recognized with several important awards.

Reservations for Showcase events, including the Celebrating Excellence recognition banquet and the Distinguished Faculty Address luncheon, may be made beginning Friday, Feb. 9, on the Showcase website at www.showcase.wsu.edu.

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WSU News Service, Washington State University, PO Box 641040, Pullman WA 99164-1040 | (509) 335-3581 | wsunews@wsu.edu or bcampbell@wsu.edu