College of Applied Sciences and Arts
Emily Wughalter, kinesiology professor, has received the 2008-09 San José State University Outstanding Professor Award. This award honors a faculty member whose academic career exemplifies excellence in teaching effectiveness.
During her 18-year tenure at San José State, Wughalter has established a remarkable record for teaching excellence and service. Student evaluations attest to her extraordinary effectiveness in the classroom. She has also served as director of the Metropolitan University Scholars Experience, which offers university-wide opportunities to help first-year students succeed at San José State. She has served in leadership roles with the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, and with the National Association for Girls and Women in Sports.
College of Education
Judith Lessow-Hurley, professor of elementary education, is the recipient of the 2008-09 San José State University Distinguished Service Award. This award recognizes exemplary leadership contributions to the university and/or the community or profession that bring credit to San José State University.
In her three decades of service to the university, Lessow-Hurley has been recognized as a pioneer in addressing the importance of providing a multicultural education and preparing future teachers for California's increasingly diverse student populations in the university and in the K-12 system. She chaired the Academic Senate for two consecutive years (2006 to 2008), earning accolades from her peers as one of the most outstanding and most effective faculty leaders of the senate in many years.
Lessow-Hurley is the university's facilitator of the Silicon Valley Higher Education Roundtable, a consortium of presidents and chancellors that works toward recruitment and success of underrepresented minority students in college. She has also served on numerous campus committees such as the Campus Fee Advisory Committee, the New Faculty Orientation Advisory Committee, and the Campus Reading Program Committee. She currently serves as an ex officio member of the University Library Board and represents the Lurie College of Education on the Campus Planning Board. As a result of a campus-wide faculty election, she is now also serving her first three-year term as one of three SJSU representatives on the CSU Statewide Senate.
College of Business
Professor William D. DeVincenzi of the Department of Accounting and Finance has been named the 2008-09 San José State Outstanding Lecturer. The honor recognizes excellence in teaching and service to the campus community.
DeVincenzi began teaching at San José State in 1994 following a successful career in corporate finance. This is an added bonus for his students, who say that nothing compares to learning from someone with in-the-field experience. His success in expanding the corporate financial management major and adding an honors practicum led to the adoption of the practicum by all College of Business departments. The subsequent college-wide honors program he developed is now supported by a $5.2 million gift from San José State alumnus Gary J. Sbona, chairman and CEO of Regent Pacific Management Corporation.
During DeVincenzi's tenure as advisor of the student Financial Management Association, the club has grown from 12 to more than 150 members and is now among the largest in the nation. He has also led student groups to both China and Central Europe to study the business practices and cultures of these regions.
College of Humanities and the Arts
Paul Douglass, professor of English and comparative literature, has been selected as the recipient of the 2008-09 President's Scholar Award. This award recognizes a faculty member who has achieved widespread recognition based on the quality of scholarship, performances, or creative activities.
Douglass has achieved widespread recognition as a leading scholar in the areas of American modernism, literary theory, music and literature, philosophy and literature and particularly in the area of British Romantic Literature. In 2007, he received the Elma Dangerfield Award of the International Byron Society for his publication of "new and original work related to the life, works and times of the poet."
In almost two decades of service to San José State, he has served as chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature; been the principal investigator for the California Literature Project; and served as director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.
SJSU Alumni Association
Beach Blanket Babylon, the world renowned San Francisco-based musical revue created by San José State alumnus Steve Silver, played to a full house in March at the California Theatre in downtown San José. This one-night-only, special engagement marked the show's 35th anniversary and raised more than $52,000 for the SJSU Alumni Association Scholarship Fund, which will now include a scholarship in Silver's honor. The event was attended by 1,160 alumni, staff, faculty and community members who enjoyed, among other things, a specially-penned operatic number about San José State, its history and prominent alumni, performed by a pink-coiffed King Louis XIV.
College of Social Sciences
How has personal technology changed how we move through the world? San José State Communication Studies Professor Andrew Wood explores that question in his latest book, City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia. Wood's research included a 108-hour road trip from New York to San Francisco during which he spoke just five words but managed to get lodging, food and gas using Internet reservations, online kiosks, after-hours key dispensers and anticipatory disengagement. The five words? Andy Wood, Andy Wood and sauce!
"Today's melding of place and media threatens our ability to experience meaningful human interaction," Wood says. Among the book's many threads is a discussion of the iPod as an "aural enclave," Wood's phrase for the way we use earphones to isolate ourselves in moving bubbles of sound, carrying miniature versions of our worlds with us, even as we ignore the actual world around us. Wood even offers tips for iPod etiquette, including, "One bud or two?" For more on Wood's book and related omnitopia topics, follow his Twitter feed.
College of Humanities and the Arts
Nils Peterson, SJSU professor emeritus of English and a cofounder of Poetry Center San José, has been appointed as the first-ever poet laureate of Santa Clara County. Peterson began his two-year term in April. The post comes with a $4,000 stipend plus funding for grassroots projects.
Peterson, 75, ran the creative writing department at SJSU for two decades and has written on everything from Shakespeare to science fiction to golf. He has published several poetry collections including "The Comedy of Desire," which has an introduction by noted poet Robert Bly, and "Here Is No Ordinary Rejoicing." Peterson is known for his annual Valentine's Day readings at the Poetry Center and his frequent community workshops.
A quilt by Salli McQuaid, MA Art '77, has been selected for exhibition in Houston at the October 2009 International Quilt Festival and Market. Titled "Starry Flight," the quilt is a take-off on Vincent Van Gogh's 1889 painting "Starry Night" and will be part of the IQF Studio Art Quilt Associates special exhibition called "A Sense of Humor."
College of Science
On March 6, 2009, when NASA launched one of its most important satellites to date, San José State Associate Professor Natalie Batalha was there to watch. She is on the NASA Ames Research Center team directing science work for the $591-million, 2,300-pound Kepler spacecraft. Kepler is NASA's first mission designed to identify and characterize habitable, earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. The mission to send the spacecraft well beyond our atmosphere has been in the works since 1992. Batalha has been affiliated with NASA Ames Research Center since 2000, conducting research on extra-solar planet detection and stellar astrophysics. For this mission, Batalha helped select which stars to observe.
San José State University has received $1.73 million in funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state's stem cell agency. SJSU will use the funds to provide students with the academic and practical experience they need to pursue careers involving stem cell research. Three San José State biology professors will partner with Escape Therapeutics, The Parkinson's Institute, Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, to help train graduate-level students in stem cell research. SJSU is one of 10 California State University campuses to receive funding from the institute; the total to the CSU schools is $16 million.
College of Humanities and the Arts
DreamWorks Animation has committed $420,000 to the SJSU School of Art and Design animation/illustration program and named Rex Grignon, head of character animation at PDI/DreamWorks, the program's first Distinguished Scholar.
Grignon has been an animator for more than 20 years and worked on such breakthrough computer-animated films as DreamWorks Animation's "Shrek," "Madagascar," "Kung Fu Panda," and "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," as well as Pixar's "Toy Story."
San José State's animation/illustration program, which serves almost 400 students annually, is using the funding to develop an expanded curriculum that will focus on building professional skills and developing techniques and processes for character animation, visual development and storyboarding.
College of Science
On April 25, D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert R. Rigsby, '83 Science, became the district's first sitting judge to leave for a war zone. Rigsby's first trial was on May 5 in Iraq where he is overseeing military cases involving U.S. soldiers accused of murder, rape, desertion, robbery and mistreatment of prisoners. Col. Stephen R. Henley, chief trial judge for the Army, said he picked Rigsby from among 40 Army judges worldwide to be the first to serve in a combat zone. Rigsby will be stationed in Kuwait but will travel to and from Iraq.
Rigsby has been in the Army for 28 years, the past 20 as a member of the Reserve. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1981 while a student at SJSU and then attended Hastings College of Law at UC, San Francisco.
University
Color of the Sea, the story of one Japanese boy's coming-of-age, has been announced as the Campus Reading Program selection for fall 2009.
Bay Area author, John Hamamura, was born in the final year of WWII in a U.S. Army hospital in Minnesota. His father was a GI Japanese language instructor and his mother's family was interned in southern Arkansas. Hamamura says on his website: "I waited years until I was old enough to ask the right questions and to hear the stories the adults would never share with children. I did not choose these stories, I was born into them. And they shaped me, just as my novel, Color of the Sea, developed out of the puzzle pieces of my family history."
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Read more about NASA's Kepler mission.
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