Fresno State math professor Dr. Tamás Forgács was selected for the university’s 2023 Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, announced Dr. Xuanning Fu, Fresno State’s provost and vice president for Academic Affairs.
The Provost’s Awards also honored the following faculty:
- Dr. Pei Xu, Department of Agricultural Business — Research, Scholarship and Creative Accomplishment Award.
- Dr. Robert Maldonado, Department of Philosophy — Faculty Service Award.
- Dr. Larissa Mercado-López, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies — Faculty Service Award.
- Michele Randel, Department of Construction Management — Outstanding Lecturer Award.
Five faculty members were selected for the Promising New Faculty category of the Provost’s Awards in recognition of their exemplary achievements in teaching, research, creative activities and/or service among non-tenured, tenure-track faculty. The honorees are:
- Dr. Marcus Crawford, assistant professor of social work education.
- Dr. Carmen Licon-Cano, assistant professor of food science and nutrition.
- Brynn Saito, assistant professor of English.
- Dr. Shahab Tayeb, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
- Dr. Ellen Woo, assistant professor of psychology.
The Provost’s Awards were established in 1993 to recognize the outstanding teaching, research and service that is central to the mission of Fresno State.
Honorees provide students with a stimulating environment that fosters learning and affirms the university as an intellectual and cultural leader in the Central Valley.
The awardees will be celebrated during an event at 3 p.m. Thursday, May 11, at the Residence Dining Hall (East Banquet Room).
Excellence in Teaching
Dr. Tamás Forgács (mathematics) said he strives to create a welcoming and challenging classroom environment, one where every student’s insights and ideas are routinely solicited and responded to in substance. From the time he joined the Department of Mathematics in 2013, Forgács has sought to eliminate barriers between the students and himself, believing that students need to feel comfortable in order for them to fully engage and participate in their learning. He and his wife invite one of his classes each semester to their home for dinner, where they talk about “anything and everything except mathematics.” Through experiences like this, he said he has found that students form better relationships with other students and are more comfortable coming to his office hours to ask for help. An active researcher and passionate educator, Forgács has been recognized by his students for his compassionate guidance, honest and meaningful evaluation and supportive mentoring.
Research, Scholarship and Creative Accomplishment Award
Dr. Pei Xu’s (agricultural business) research emphasizes the economic impact of food consumption to quantify consumer-level price acceptance during market fluctuations. Her work provides policy implications about food consumption when demand changes in domestic and international markets. Her many publications in top agribusiness journals have garnered over 500 scholarly citations, and she has made nearly 50 conference presentations on California-produced commodities like rice, almonds, red wine, milk and pistachios, as well as on international trade issues and water conservation in Central California. She actively collaborates on research grants with faculty colleagues at Fresno State and from other universities, and she regularly involves her students in research activities. In 2015, Xu won the Provost’s Award for Promising New Faculty, and, in 2022, she received the Jordan College of Agricultural Sciences and Technology Outstanding Faculty Research Award. Xu began teaching at Fresno State in 2011.
Faculty Service Award
Dr. Robert Maldonado (philosophy) has been actively involved in service to Fresno State and surrounding communities for 32 years. He believes teaching, scholarship and service are interwoven and necessary for Fresno State’s primary mission: student success. Maldonado has served on numerous committees and in various leadership roles over the course of his career. He was one of the founding members of the Smittcamp Family Honors College. He has chaired the University Budget Committee and has served since 2016 on the Board of Directors for Fresno State’s Athletic Corporation. He has participated with 12 cohorts of students studying abroad in London, served as a member of the board of the Edward O. Lund Foundation, and brought academic biblical studies to a wider audience via programming on KNXT (Fresno’s local Catholic TV station).
Dr. Larissa Mercado-López (women’s, gender and sexuality studies) has worked to improve the campus community since she arrived at Fresno State in 2013. Her efforts include implementing initiatives for Latinx faculty, women faculty of color and faculty caregivers. Her service has included improving conditions for Fresno State students who are parents. She has advocated on campus, throughout the CSU and across the state to collect data on student-parents and to implement specific strategies to support them, including a children’s clothing closet, parent workshops and mentoring. She is the founding director for the CSU Student Success Network, which brings together faculty, staff, administrators and students to share equity-minded practices. She also founded the Latin@s in Academia Lecture Series to improve the number of Latina students in graduate programs.
Outstanding Lecturer Award
Michele Randel (construction management) has been acknowledged by her peers as a leader in the Lyles College of Engineering, in large part because of her initiative in launching the university’s architectural studies program, Fresno State’s newest and fastest-growing undergraduate degree program. Architectural studies has grown from 14 students in 2020 to 168 enrolled students for the fall 2023 semester, with the expectation of more than 200 students by 2024. In fall 2022, Randel was officially appointed the program director, responsible for advising, developing program assessment protocols and engaging with industry partners and donors. She led the design of a new architectural design studio in the Engineering East building and is also working with community colleges to develop articulation agreements for architecture courses. She has done all of this while maintaining a high teaching load.
Promising New Faculty
Dr. Marcus Crawford (social work education) came to Fresno State in 2018 and has served as an advocate for marginalized populations in the Central Valley and beyond. He has been the faculty adviser of the Social Work Student Association since 2021, has served on 13 departmental committees and is first author on seven publications. He is leading the Department of Social Work Education’s effort to host a research symposium in the fall, regularly hosts workshops to support student success in the areas of thesis and project writing, and has helped in the redesign of the graduate curriculum while serving as the assessment coordinator for the department’s upcoming accreditation. In 2021, he was selected as the university nominee for the Carnegie Fellowship for Emerging Faculty.
Dr. Carmen Licon-Cano (food science and nutrition) arrived at Fresno State with a vision to create a world-class dairy production program where students, faculty from multiple disciplines, and industry come together for the innovation and advancement of California agricultural products. She has worked tirelessly on 25 multidisciplinary grant proposals, bringing in nearly $24 million in funding. Since October 2021, she has served as the director of the Pacific Coast Coalition-Dairy Business Innovation Initiative, a multiregional project funded by the USDA-AMS that will allow Fresno State to upgrade and improve the creamery’s infrastructure, provide technical assistance and sub-awards to more than 50 dairy businesses across the western states. It will also promote students’ experiential learning and professional development by offering more than 30 paid internships. She serves on numerous committees, is actively involved in six professional organizations and is a founding member of the steering committee for the California Dairy Innovation Center.
Photo courtesy of Dave Lehl
Brynn Saito (English) frequently mines her family history in her work as a poet. She is the granddaughter of Korean immigrants who labored in the South Valley orchards and fields, and the granddaughter of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in southern Arizona during World War II. In 2017, with farmer and artist Nikiko Masumoto, she co-founded the Yonsei Memory Project, an educational outreach that commemorates survivors of World War II Japanese American internment. Since her tenure-track appointment in 2018, she has signed two book publishing contracts with nationally recognized publishers, completed her third collection of poetry (to be published in August) and continues to shape the landscape of Asian American Pacific Islander and Japanese American literature on a national scale. She is the graduate coordinator of the Master of Fine Arts program, leading new curricular initiatives while working with her colleagues to recruit, retain and showcase Fresno State’s students.
Dr. Shahab Tayeb (electrical and computer engineering) is a first-generation college graduate whose path has been shaped by higher education. Since joining Fresno State in 2018, Tayeb has led faculty groups; placed articles in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and book chapters; and mentored graduate and undergraduate students who have been awarded dean’s medals and competitive opportunities, including Google internships and international best paper prizes. Tayeb’s research activities have positioned him at the forefront of various cybersecurity initiatives with critical industry applications in consumer electronics, manufacturing, infrastructure safety, transportation and more. In addition to publications and research mentoring, Tayeb has written and submitted 26 grant proposals with interdisciplinary collaborations across the CSU and nationally. During the pandemic, Tayeb developed training materials to support faculty with online/virtual teaching, then led campus-wide programs to train faculty and teaching assistants for virtual instruction.
Dr. Ellen Woo (psychology), a two-time Fresno State alumna, joined the Department of Psychology in 2019. A prolific research scientist and educator, Woo has impacted the Fresno State campus through her program of interdisciplinary research in neuropsychology, her innovative classroom instruction and her role as a mentor. In her four years at the university, Woo has produced five publications and more than 100 presentations with collaborators from across this campus and other institutions, often including undergraduate and graduate students in her scholarly work. One of her primary goals is to establish a Brain Health Institute at Fresno State, which she has been working toward with colleagues at Fresno State and UCSF Fresno. Her objective is to address the significant health, psychological and economic impact of diseases that affect brain health, with a particular focus on the medically underserved Central Valley.
