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Illinois State University will honor 14 faculty members for teaching and research during the Founders Day Convocation at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16, in the Bone Student Center Brown Ballroom.

Cynthia Langrall of the Mathematics department and Lisa Szczepura of the Chemistry department are the 2012 Outstanding University Researchers. The Outstanding University Research Award goes to faculty whose research has been acknowledged by their peers in the U.S. and internationally.

George Byrns of the Health Sciences department and Craig McLauchlan of the Chemistry department are the 2011-2012 Outstanding University Teachers. Elisabeth Reed of the Family and Consumer Sciences department is the Category 2 Outstanding University Teacher, a classification for non-tenured faculty. The Outstanding University Teacher Award is given to faculty whose teaching accomplishments are unusually significant and meritorious among their colleagues.

Research Initiative Award recipients include Josh Brown, Technology; Hae Jin Gam, Family and Consumer Sciences; Jun-Hyun Kim, Chemistry; Lydia Kyei-Blankson, Educational Administration and Foundations; Somnath Lahiri, Management and Quantitative Methods; Maria Moore, Communications; and Carl Schimmel, Music. The Research Initiative Award is given to faculty members who have initiated a promising research agenda early in their academic careers.

Teaching Initiative Award recipients include Cynthia Edmonds-Cady, Social Work, and Lydia Kyei-Blankson, Educational Administration and Foundations. The Teaching Initiative Award is given to faculty members who have shown considerable promise in teaching early in their careers.

Langrall is a mathematics educator whose outstanding work in students’ probabilistic and statistical thinking has international significance in an area in which minimal work was done prior to the publication of her seminal papers on this topic. Her publications establish two theoretical frameworks with which to understand children’s probabilistic and statistical thinking. Due to these frameworks, she was invited to co-author three chapters in three different prestigious international handbooks on mathematics education research that establish standards for the discipline. Langrall has published six books, approximately 30 refereed research articles or book chapters, was co-author of two reports commissioned by the National Research Council, and garnered over $1.5 million in external grant funding. She has served on three National Science Foundation Review panels as well as on the Advisory Board for the international Teacher Education Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) in 2009. As testimony to the high esteem in which Langrall’s work is held, she was selected by a blue-ribbon panel of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics as the new editor of the most important mathematics education research journal in the world, the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, which will be housed at Illinois State for the next four years. She has directed or co-directed 15 dissertations and served on another 18 dissertation committees. In addition, her Ph.D. students, with positions at places such as the University of Missouri and Florida State University, have also made significant contributions to the field. Since 2005, Langrall has also served as director of the mathematics education doctoral program at Illinois State. Langrall has an excellent reputation as a teacher both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, with her teaching being recognized by the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics with the Max Beberman Award in 2000. Her more recent work focuses on studying the interaction between one’s knowledge of context and one’s ability to analyze and interpret data. In particular, Langrall is currently studying the interplay between context knowledge and the statistical knowledge that students access when handling data. 

Szczepura joined the faculty at Illinois State University in 1997 as an assistant professor of inorganic chemistry and was promoted to the rank of professor in 2009. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1989 and her doctorate in chemistry in 1994, both from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Szczepura was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois from 1994 to 1997 before joining the Department of Chemistry. While at Illinois State, she has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University (2001-2002) and the University of California at Berkeley (2004-2005). Szczepura has earned numerous awards for research and for teaching. At the national level, she has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Radcliffe Fellowship. At Illinois State, Szczepura received the Outstanding University Teacher Award, the Outstanding College Researcher Award, the Outstanding College Teacher Award, the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching, the Research Initiative Award and the Teaching Initiative Award. Her research focuses on preparing and characterizing new metal cluster compounds, with the eventual goal of creating catalysts for cleaner and more efficient industrial processes. Szczepura has earned more than $1.5 million in grants to support this work, and published more than 20 articles involving numerous undergraduate and graduate students. Since 1997, she has mentored 14 master’s degree students and 24 undergraduate students in the research laboratory, and these students have made numerous presentations at national/international, regional and local meetings. As part of her National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Szczepura implemented a workshop program for minority students interested in careers in science. The program encouraged students from underrepresented groups to participate in undergraduate research, with the goal of increasing retention and graduation rates of the students. Of the students completing the program, 60 percent became actively involved in research and graduated with a science degree. This blending of the mutually supportive areas of teaching and research typify Szczepura’s career at Illinois State.

Byrns is a professor of environmental health in the Department of Health Sciences. He came to Illinois State in 1999 after a 25-year career with the U.S. Public Health Service. Bryns has taught primarily undergraduate courses in environmental and occupational health. He has also published the textbook, Hazard Recognition and Control in Institutional Settings: A Guide for Hospitals, Universities and Nursing Homes in 2009. His teaching philosophy centers on the belief that for subjects such as environmental and occupational health, understanding is not sufficient. Students must be encouraged to apply theoretical concepts to real-world situations. In order to create opportunities to apply these concepts, Byrns uses problem-based learning (PBL) methods in his classes. He was also an early adopter of classroom response technology (clickers) to encourage active participation by all students, even in large general education classes. Recently, he began integrating clickers into PBL case studies. Byrns won an award from the Illinois State Student Educational Association and in 2007 was honored with the College of Applied Science and Technology Outstanding College Teacher Award.

McLauchlan is an associate professor and the associate chair of Undergraduate Programs in the Chemistry department at Illinois State. He received his A.B. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and started his career at Illinois State in 2002. McLauchlan was promoted to associate professor in 2008. He has taught courses at all levels in the Chemistry department and has lectured to over 2,000 students and mentored over 20 students in his research laboratory. Outside of the classroom and laboratory, McLauchlan has been involved with students as a faculty floor mentor in the residence halls and as a Presidential Scholar mentor.  He has received several teaching awards, including the Illinois State 2005-06 University Teaching Initiative Award, the 2007 College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and the 2010-11 College of Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching (STEM disciplines). McLauchlan’s research group focuses on coordination chemistry involving vanadium, among other metals, for use as oxidation catalysts and/or enzyme inhibitors. He has published several manuscripts with his master’s degree students and undergraduate student co-workers in this area. Their work is currently funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to McLauchlan. He believes that his research laboratory is a natural learning environment beyond the classroom, and he enjoys the thrill of discovering never-before-seen results alongside his students. McLauchlan also received a University Research Initiative Award in 2006-07.

Reed is an assistant professor in Family and Consumer Sciences. After studies and professional experience in architecture, she earned a master’s degree in fashion design from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006. In 2008, Reed began teaching at Illinois State in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences in the apparel, merchandising and design sequence, including courses on textiles, apparel product development, apparel product analysis, fashion trend and industry analysis, cultural diversity in dress, and fashion promotion. Reed is committed to bringing real-life scenarios into her classroom and works to pull from her own personal design experiences to relate the subject matter to the real world. She believes that an interactive learning environment fosters students' own creativity and a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Reed often takes her students outside the classroom to visit locations throughout the community such as a local alpaca farm, various retail locations, thrift stores, fabric shops and design studios. She is an active advisor with the student-led Apparel Merchandising and Design Association and has planned numerous fall trips to nearby cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis and St. Louis, where students receive a behind-the-scenes tour of industry locations. She also organized a weeklong study tour to Los Angeles for both apparel and interior design students and is currently planning a spring study tour to New York City.