The University of Louisiana at Lafayette Foundation will present five Eminent Faculty Awards during ceremonies Thursday.
The Dr. Ray P. Authement Excellence in Teaching Award is named for the University’s fifth president. It was created in 1992 to recognize faculty commitment to teaching and innovation. This year’s recipients are Dr. Chad Parker, associate professor of history, and Dr. Michael Totaro, associate professor of computing and informatics.
Dr. Boyun Guo, professor of petroleum engineering, and Corey Saft, professor of architecture, are the recipients of the Distinguished Professor Award. Established in 1965, the award honors educators for their research, teaching effectiveness, and contributions to their professions and to campus life.
The Leadership in Service Award honoree is Brian Kelly, professor of visual arts. The award recognizes a faculty member who combines service learning with classroom instruction to forge skills and knowledge that students can apply to community leadership opportunities. The Foundation presented the inaugural Leadership in Service Award in 2016.
A committee composed of faculty members from each academic discipline, and led by the director of the Office of Academic Planning and Faculty Development, selects the finalists, and the Foundation presents the awards based on the panel’s recommendations.
Each award carries a $5,000 stipend. They will be presented during ceremonies at Le Pavillon in Parc Lafayette. More information is available at www.ullafayettefoundation.org/efa
Brief biographies of the honorees follow.
Dr. Chad Parker joined the UL Lafayette history faculty in 2008 and quickly established himself as an innovator in the classroom and beyond.
In addition to service as the Department of History, Geography and Philosophy’s graduate student coordinator, Parker maintains an active schedule of professional engagement, and his regular attendance at conferences and consistent focus on improving his classroom methods ensures “my teaching remains timely, relevant and engaging,” he said.
But Parker is also focused on teaching history beyond the traditional classroom setting. He developed the department’s first online course offerings in 2012 and spearheaded undergraduate research conferences where students presented their work to peers and other scholars.
His work has had a measurable impact, department chair Dr. Sara Ritchey wrote in support of Parker’s nomination for the Authement Excellence in Teaching Award. “I have observed countless students express how their lives and understanding of the world have changed completely due to enrolling in Dr. Parker’s courses,” she concluded. “Bringing new significance, an informed and meaningful engagement, to students’ outlook on their local and global communities is without doubt the most important work we can do as scholars and professors.”
Dr. Michael Totaro has been a driving force in UL Lafayette’s School of Computing and Informatics since its inception in 2011. He joined the University’s faculty in 1996 and taught in the B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration for 15 years.
He is a two-time winner of the John T. and Sandra B. Landry Award for Teaching Excellence and a four-time recipient of the UL Lafayette Award for Excellence in Academic Advising.
He serves as the School of Computing and Informatics’ associate director for academic affairs and undergraduate education.
In his letter nominating Totaro for the Authement Excellence in Teaching Award, Dr. Xindong Wu, program director of the School of Computing and Informatics, wrote that the professor’s commitment to remaining current in his ever-changing field guarantees his students will learn latest and best practices.
“In fact, many of his students’ group projects require significant interactions between informatics students and firms in industry, thereby providing students with opportunities to learn experimentally the ‘unstructured’ problems facing informatics professionals on a nearly daily basis,” Wu wrote.
Like Totaro, Distinguished Professor Award recipient Dr. Boyun Guo builds relationships with business and industry and applies those real-life lessons to his work as a petroleum engineering professor.
His career in oil and gas began in 1982 while working for a drilling company in his native China, and he worked as a petroleum engineer in Houston before joining the UL Lafayette faculty in 2000.
He continues to offer technical advice to oil and gas companies and his contributions have earned awards from regional, national and international chapters of the Society of Petroleum Engineers.
Guo has received more than $2.5 million in external funding, including grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA, which twice honored him as a Faculty Fellow. The UL Lafayette College of Engineering recognized him as its 2016 Researcher of the Year. He was the college’s 2008 Teacher of the Year.
Guo has collaborated on more than 10 books and has 70 journal articles to his credit.
Corey Saft is a practicing architect and has been a professor in the School of Architecture and Design since 2003. His peers on and off campus consider him an expert in the field of sustainable design, construction and performance.
One of his most significant designs, the LeBois House and Courtyard, was the first certified Passive House in the South. Passive House is a construction concept that focuses on energy efficiency, internal air quality and comfort, but it had been applied only in colder environments until Saft designed LeBois House.
He is also engaged in environmental initiatives to shore up Louisiana’s fading coastline, projects to design classrooms that are responsive to the needs of students and teachers, and to develop apps that teach green energy concepts to elementary-age children.
Saft envisions “buildings as living experiments,” New Orleans architect Z Smith wrote in a letter of support for the award. “By instrumenting his projects, observing their performance, and making modifications as data comes in, he exemplifies the best in the emerging field of evidence-based architecture.”
Brian Kelly, a professor of visual arts and this year’s recipient of the Leadership in Service Award, combines traditional methods of printmaking with cutting-edge technological advances. His efforts have placed UL Lafayette’s printmaking program at the vanguard of the craft.
Kelly is coordinator of Marais Press, the only professional printmaking facility on a Louisiana university campus. It attracts local and national printmakers to UL Lafayette. It is also a laboratory where Kelly fuses his research into nontoxic, alternative and computerized printmaking techniques with more traditional methods.
Last summer, he held a two-week camp in which his students mentored middle- and high-schoolers in the latest printmaking techniques. The camp helped his students sharpen their teaching skills and nurtured a spirit of service.
Kelly’s prints have been featured in nearly 500 national and international exhibitions since 1988. He joined the University’s Visual Arts faculty in 1999.
This is the second time the UL Lafayette Foundation has honored Kelly. He received a Distinguished Professor Award in 2010.
Photo: (left to right): Dr. Chad Parker, Dr. Michael Totaro, Dr. Boyun Guo, Corey Saft and Brian Kelly. Doug Dugas/University of Louisiana at Lafayette