Dr. Priscilla Chaffe-Stengel, professor of information and decision sciences, has been awarded the top teaching honor at Fresno State.

Interim Provost Andrew Hoff named Chaffe-Stengel as recipient of the 2014 Excellence in Teaching Award.

The Provost’s Awards also honored the following individuals:

  • Dr. Christopher Lucey, professor of counselor education and rehabilitation, for the Faculty Service Award.
  • Dr. William Skuban, professor of history, for the Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.
  • Dr. Yongsheng Gao, associate professor of physics, for the Research, Scholarship and Creative Accomplishment Award.
  • Dr. Arun Nambiar, assistant professor of industrial technology, for the Technology in Education Award.

In addition, Hoff named seven faculty members for the Promising New Faculty award, which recognizes exemplary achievements in teaching, research/creative activities and/or service among non-tenured, tenure-track faculty.

Honorees are Qiao-Hong Chen, assistant professor of chemistry; Randa Jarrar, assistant professor of English; Marianne Jackson, assistant professor of psychology; Eric Liguori, assistant professor of management; Fayzul Pasha, assistant professor of civil and geomatics engineering; Jenelle Pitt, assistant professor of counselor education and rehabilitation; and Frances Pomaville, assistant professor of communicative disorders and deaf studies.

The awards include stipends of $5,500 for the Excellence in Teaching recipient and $3,000 each to the other awardees.

Provost’s Awards

Dr. Priscilla Chaffe-Stengel (information and decision sciences) has been at Fresno State since 1984. Her research and teaching are deeply connected. She designs class assignments to capture aspects of business practice that students may encounter in the workplace and helps students work collaboratively to solve problems and apply concepts in practical settings. Under her direction, the courses in decision sciences are among the most effectively coordinated sets of multi-section courses in the Craig School of Business. She has actively sought and delivered on three separate curriculum innovation grants that support student learning. She has visited and/or consulted with more than 25 businesses in the Valley to bring current practices and applications into the classroom.

Dr. Christopher Lucey (counselor education and rehabilitation) has been at Fresno State since 1998. He served as coordinator of the counselor education program and chaired the committee that developed the strategic plan for the Kremen School of Education and Human Development. He has presented and published nationally. He received the Richter Award in 2010 for providing outstanding leadership in counselor educator preparation. He is a longtime leader at the Fresno Family Counseling Center, where he started as associate director in 1999 and became the director in 2008. He said his involvement with the Hmong Suicide Program is his most fulfilling community service.

Dr. William Skuban (history) has been at Fresno State since 1998. He has served as a Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program mentor, which has allowed him to advise undergraduates about continuing into Fresno State master’s program or gain entrance directly into a doctoral program. Through his efforts, he has inspired dozens of students to enroll in Fresno State’s graduate program in history. He has published numerous articles based on his research on Chile and Peru and has published a book with a university press, “Lines in the Sand: Nationalism and Identity on the Peruvian-Chilean Frontier.”

Dr. Yongsheng Gao (physics) has been at Fresno State since 2007. He has represented Fresno State since then as a member of the ATLAS collaboration, which operates one of two main experiments that use the Large Hadron Collider particle in Switzerland at the multinational Center for Nuclear Research. He and his students were involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson (or “God particle”), which gained global attention. He is coauthor on more than 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Since 2009, he has been awarded three National Science Foundation grants as principal investigator for more than $1.5 million.

Dr. Arun Nambiar (industrial technology) has been at Fresno State since 2008. He teaches undergraduate, graduate and online courses. His incorporation of classroom technology includes captioned video podcasts he created and made available via the campus streaming server integrated into Blackboard, iTunesU and YouTube. He also conducted virtual live classroom sessions using Blackboard Collaborate. In his courses, he incorporates social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and Web 2.0 tools, including Bundlr, Scoopit and Remind101. His work has been published numerous times and has a book in the works.

2014 Promising New Faculty

Qiao-Hong Chen (chemistry) has been at Fresno State since 2012. She has established a highly productive research program involving students and set up two complementary research laboratories. Her lab is a magnet for students interested in organic synthesis, natural products and medicinal chemistry.

Randa Jarrar (English), who has been at Fresno State since 2010, has served as the sole fiction editor for The Normal School, Fresno State’s nationally recognized flagship literary magazine. Since August 2010, she has published nine original pieces. As vice president of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) she is planning a biennial conference.

Marianne Jackson (psychology) has been at Fresno State since 2008. She performs research in Applied Behavior Analysis and is working with the Central California Autism Center at Fresno State. She developed a Technologies for Educational and Social Advancement program, serving children with social skills deficits.

Eric Liguori (management) has been at Fresno State since 2011. His developments in experiential entrepreneurship education were featured in The Entrepreneurship Educator. He received a grant to provide an Entrepreneurial Skill Development Workshop Series, which has benefited more than 800 students.

Fayzul Pasha (civil and geomatics engineering) has been at Fresno State since 2012. His expertise is in water resources modeling and management. He received grants of $150,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy for work on assessing energy potential from new small hydropower systems and $62,000 from the Department of Energy for work on hydropower resource assessment.

Jenelle Pitt (counselor education and rehabilitation), has been at Fresno State since 2009. She recently won the prestigious national Rehabilitation Educator of the Year Award from the National Council on Rehabilitation Education. Her work has been published numerous times and she has presented at 26 national or state conferences.

Frances Pomaville (communicative disorders and deaf studies) has been at Fresno State since 2008. She works with veterans with brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder at the Veterans Administration Central California Health Care facility in Fresno. She is a member of the core group that started the Central Valley Concussion Consortium in 2013.