Tuesday,
May 1, 2001
Volume 47
Number 32
www.upenn.edu/almanac/


More Teaching Awards...

Dental Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards

Five faculty members of the School of Dental Medicine were honored recently for excellence in teaching. Dr. Philip Giarraputo, Assistant Professor Clinician Educator of General Restorative Dentistry and Dr. Yi-Tai Jou, Assistant Professor of Endodontics, both received the Earle Bank Hoyt Award, presented to an outstanding full-time junior clinical faculty member who is also a Penn Dental graduate. This is the second year in a row Dr. Giarraputo received this award.

The Joseph L.T. Appleton Award, presented to a part-time faculty member for excellence in clinical instruction, went to Dr. Steven Liu, Assistant Professor Clinician Educator of General Restorative Dentistry. Dr. Margrit Maggio, Staff Dentist in the Dental Care Network, received the Robert E. DeRevere Award for excellence in preclinical teaching by a part-time faculty member.

Finally, Dr. Elliot Hersh, Associate Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Oral Surgery/Pharmacology, received the Basic Science Award. Long recognized for his teaching excellence in this area, Dr. Hersh has been given this award eight of the past 11 years.

In addition, three SDM faculty were inducted into Omicron Kappa Upsilon (OKU), the national dental honor society. Faculty OKU membership was awarded to Dr. Uri Hangorsky, Clinical Associate Professor of Periodontics; Dr. Yi-Tai Jou, Assistant Professor of Endondontics; and Dr. Najeed Saleh, Clinical Assistant Professor of General Restorative Dentistry.


GSE Excellence in Teaching

Dr. Kathy Schultz, assistant professor in the Educational Leadership Division at GSE, is the recipient of GSE's top teaching honor, the GSE Excellence in Teaching Award. The students who nominated Dr. Schultz cited her commitment to teaching and mentoring as factors of her success with students in the classroom.

"As a teacher, Kathy facilitates rich discussions, fosters student-centered learning, invites inquiry, and challenges us to be rigorous in our work," said a GSE doctoral student.

Dr. Schultz has taught a number of courses for which she was praised. In her course "Critical Perspectives on Urban Schooling," Dr. Schultz engaged students in many kinds of important learning activities, said another GSE doctoral student. "It is obvious that she and her then co-instructor Judy Buchanan, put a lot of time and thought into preparing classes."

Dr. Schultz teaches courses on literacy in the elementary teacher education program and on Critical Perspectives in Urban Education. Her current research focus is on student perspectives on schooling, urban teacher education, and the interrelationships between literacy and identity. Since joining the GSE faculty in 1997, Dr. Schultz has engaged in numerous research projects including a three-year study of a long-term teacher network, funded by the Spencer and MacArthur foundations. After spending eight years as a classroom teacher and principal in Philadelphia elementary schools, Dr. Schultz earned her doctorate in Reading, Writing, Literacy at Penn. Following post doctorate work, research and teaching at the University of California Berkeley, she joined the faculty of the University of Delaware, where, as an assistant professor, she initiated a project on race relations in a post-desegregated middle school.

GSE Student Teaching Awards

William E. Arnold Award

GSE doctoral student Martha Bryans is the 2001 recipient of the William E. Arnold Award, which recognizes her outstanding accomplishments as a doctoral student.

Professor Peter Kuriloff describes Ms. Bryans as a "model student and citizen." Her service to the school included participation in a Division-wide curriculum review and tenure as a student mediator.

Ms. Bryans, who graduates with her doctorate in Educational Leadership in May 2001, recently accepted a job as Head of the Haverford Friends School.


Phi Delta Kappa Award

Erin Tighe is the recipient of GSE's Phi Delta Kappa Award for Outstanding Dissertation. Ms. Tighe defended her dissertation this spring and will graduate with her doctorate in School, Community, and Clinical Child Psychology in May 2001.

"This dissertation marks one of the most superbly executed and influential works I have seen in years," said Dr. Paul McDermott, who nominated Ms. Tighe for the award.

In her dissertation, titled The Multiple Relationships Between Health and Environment Risk Factors and School Performance: A Longitudinal Investigation of Urban Elementary Students, Ms. Tighe investigates the factors that place youth at risk for failure in school.



GSFA Teaching Award: Robert Slutzky

The G. Holmes Perkins Award is given in recognition of distinguished teaching and innovation in the methods of instruction in the classroom, seminar, or studio to a faculty member in the Graduate School of Fine Arts.

This year's recipient is Robert Slutzky, Professor of Painting in the Department of Fine Arts. Professor Slutzky's courses in color and collage have had a great impact not only on fine arts students, but also those in GSFA's various departments of architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, and historic preservation. Through his knowledge of architecture and his fascination with the interplay of modern painting with this discipline, he has long been able to breach the gap between two very different modes of teaching, reaching both those who work in the relative solitude of a painting studio, and those whose work is by nature cooperative.

The award is named in honor of G. Holmes Perkins who served as Dean of the GSFA from 1951-1971, and was established by the former Dean and Paley Professor Patricia Conway in 1993. G. Holmes Perkins has long been internationally recognized as a brilliant planner and educator, attracting an extraordinary faculty to the University.


New Director: Ackoff Center for Advancement of the Systems Approach

Dr. Barry G. Silverman has been appointed the director of the Ackoff Center for Advancement of the Systems Approach (ACASA). The former director, Dr. G. Anandalingam established the Center in July 2000 and served as the Center's first director. The Ackoff Center, named for Dr. Russell Ackoff, Emeritus Anheuser-Busch Professor of Wharton, is a think tank for systems theory and applications. ACASA has been fostering collaborations between faculty from engineering and those in the behavioral sciences for research at the frontiers of the mathematics of chaos and non-linear dynamics, emergent behavior simulation, decision modeling, and informatics for complex mechanical, biological, social, and ecological systems. The present day mathematics of complexity has made initial inroads into modeling and improving behaviors for these four types of systems. Advancing both the science and the practice is possible by forming multi-disciplinary teams interested in system behavior modeling and interventions, creating applications, and extracting lessons learned.

Dr. Silverman is a professor of systems engineering, professor of computer and information science and professor of operations and information management at Wharton, who earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Penn in 1975 and 1977. Dr. Silverman brings experience in the fields of artificial intelligence, decision science, virtual reality, and general systems theory to his new role as Director of the Ackoff Center. An example of the type of systems thinking supported by the principles of the Ackoff Center is the Heart Sense Game developed by Dr. Silverman and a team of about 30 others at Penn. The HS Game, sponsored by the NIH/National Library of Medicine and the National Heart Attack Alert Program, is a virtual reality-based intervention that seeks to alter the mindset and improve distributed decision making by individuals in a high risk setting.

"As complexity grows, organizations shift from top down command and control to decentralized management-and rely on co-evolving, self-adaptive sub-groups and individuals. New approaches are needed to model, de-bias, and enhance the performance of these distributed, emergent parts so that the whole improves its performance. The HS Game is just the first of many such interventions we anticipate to help distributed decision makers become better (systems) thinkers in complex information environments. We already have sponsorship to research interventions for e-commerce and for countering violence, and we are eager for more behavioral science and/or engineering faculty to join with us in these activities," explains Dr. Silverman.


Life-Sciences Greenhouse
  Gov. Tom Ridge came to the Wistar Institute last Wed-nesday to kick off a statewide, three-city promotion of his landmark Life-Sciences Greenhouse proposal to encourage the General Assembly to promptly pass this component of his tobacco-settlement plan. As announced in the Government Affairs Update (Almanac February 27), the Governor's plan would make $90 million available to build on the biotechnology research being done at universities such as Penn as well as at biotech firms in the Commonwealth. State Sen. Allyson Schwartz, a prime sponsor of the legislation, was also on hand to show bipartisan support for the initiative which she said will be "a legacy." The greenhouses will be a network of statewide innovation centers based in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg that Gov. Ridge said would improve the health of the state and the health of its economy.  


Almanac, Vol. 47, No. 32, May 1, 2001

| FRONT PAGE | CONTENTS | JOB-OPS | CRIMESTATS | AGENDA FOR EXCELLENCE 1995-2001 | TEACHING AWARDS 2001: Dental; GSE; GSFA | TALK ABOUT TEACHING ARCHIVE | BETWEEN ISSUES | MAY at PENN |