2016-2017 Faculty Recognition

Alden Smith

The Cornelia Marschall Smith Award is presented to a faculty member who makes “a superlative contribution to the learning environment at Baylor, including teaching which is judged to be of the highest order of intellectual acumen and pedagogical effectiveness, research which is recognized as outstanding by the national and/or international and local community of scholars, and service which is regarded as exemplary in building the character of intellectual community at Baylor.”

Dr. Alden Smith, professor and chair of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences and associate dean of the Honors College, was honored as the 2017 Cornelia Marschall Smith Professor of the Year during the Academic Honors Convocation in April. During the upcoming academic year, Smith will present a public lecture on an academic topic of his choosing.

As a professor of classics, Smith teaches classes in Latin and Greek poetry and prose. He has also taught in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, the Great Texts program and the University Scholars program. In addition to his teaching, Smith has authored, co-authored or edited seven books, with an eighth in progress. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews and has presented dozens of lectures in the United States and abroad.

“It is a testimony to my students, for they are the ones who bring the best out of me and my colleagues. The award really is theirs,” Smith said.

In support of Smith’s nomination, one student said, “In all honesty, it is difficult to pick a place from which to begin when I think about the kind of commitment that Dr. Smith shows to his role as a mentor and teacher at Baylor University.”

Sara Alexander and Jungjun Park

Created by the Baylor Centennial Class of 1945, this award provides tenured professors with funding for research projects that will facilitate in-depth study in their fields. Dr. Sara Alexander, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Dr. Jungjun Park, graduate program director and associate professor of communication sciences and disorders in the Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences, were selected as recipients of the 2017 Baylor Centennial Professor Awards.

Alexander will use the award for travel to Guatemala City and Merida to review archival documents, including personal diaries, journals and other miscellaneous texts, kept by colonials and local farmers that profile historical insight into the understanding of weather and climate from various perspectives. After Alexander completes this research, she will be teaching a freshman seminar, “Weather, Culture and Climate,” and an upper-division anthropology course, “Climate Anthropology,” in which she will introduce students to these data sets to further their understanding of how people thought about and responded to the weather.

Park’s project is focused on constructing a bilingual database of language samples to serve school-based speech-language pathologists and graduate educators nationwide for their professional clinical training activities.

“The ultimate goals are to generate a pilot-scale language database and a Baylor-centered website; disseminate the resources to speech-language pathologists, clinical educators and graduate students nationwide; and construct a team of global clinical researchers for a follow-up, full-scale data collection and an NIH grant proposal,” Park said.

The database will include video recordings of bilingual public school children from multiple states, particularly English language learners speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Korean and Vietnamese as their primary language.

Jonathan Tran

The Collins Outstanding Professor program was funded in 1994 by the Carr P. Collins Foundation to honor outstanding teachers at Baylor University. Recipients are chosen annually by a senior class vote, receive a cash award and deliver an open lecture on the Baylor campus.

Dr. Jonathan Tran, associate professor of religion in the College of Arts and Sciences, is the 2017 recipient. He presented the annual Collins lecture titled “My Life With Students: Wittgensteinian Thoughts on Baylor Students” on April 20, in which he combined his two professional worlds — academic research related to linguistic theology and student life in terms of intentional community.

Tran joined Baylor’s Religion Department in 2006, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, including Christian Ethics; Bioethics; Race, Religion and Reconciliations; and seminars in contemporary theological problems. His research examines the theological and political implications of human life in language.

“Around the same time I was notified about the Collins Award, I found out that I would be giving the 2017 All Academic Convocation address, and that honor is bestowed by faculty,” Tran said. “To be affirmed by both students and colleagues is undoubtedly a nice feeling, but more so, it affirms a common set of hopes we share at Baylor, and I’m just privileged to be a part of it.”

Outstanding Professors for 2016-2017

TAMARA HODGES
Senior Lecturer, Educational Psychology
School of Education

JEFF HUNT
Senior Lecturer, Classics
College of Arts and Sciences

BENJAMIN S. KELLEY
Professor, Mechanical Engineering
School of Engineering and Computer Science

DAVID A. JACK
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
School of Engineering and Computer Science

RICHARD R. RUSSELL
Professor, English
College of Arts and Sciences

SARA J. PERRY
Assistant Professor, Management
Hankamer School of Business