APS Members are Professors of the Year, Detweiler-Bedell Receives National Award

Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, Associate Professor of Psychology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon has been named 2008 Outstanding Baccalaureate College Professor of the Year in a joint award by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Each year, just four professors in the United States are selected as national level winners of this prestigious honor. Winners of the award are chosen for their “distinguished teaching, their enthusiasm for learning, their caring and selfless attitudes, and their high expectations of their students and themselves.”

Together with her husband, Brian, Detweiler-Bedell devised the innovative Behavioral Health and Social Psychology Lab, in which undergraduate students design and carry out research projects in the fields of social, clinical, and health psychology. The lab is an active learning environment designed around the needs of the undergrads who work there. Students work in teams of three: one experienced senior psychology major as team leader, one junior or sophomore as associate researcher, and a student new to psychology as research assistant. Teams formulate questions, write literature reviews, collect data, and even present their findings at psychological conferences.  The lab is so successful that the Detweiler-Bedells have received a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and disseminate a model of their program.

When asked what receiving the Professor of the Year Award meant to her, Detweiler-Bedell said it “affords me the opportunity to champion the importance of undergraduate education in general and faculty-student collaborative research in particular. When I was an undergraduate, my career path was shaped directly by my own experiences interacting with faculty who took my ideas seriously and welcomed me into the scientific study of psychology. I strive each day to treat my undergraduates with the same high level of respect.”

State Awards Honor Bruce and Mickley

Two other APS Members have been named state-wide Professors of the Year: Katherine Bruce, Professor of Psychology at UNC Wilmington in North Carolina, and G. Andrew Mickley, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio.

Bruce’s research at UNCW focuses on comparative cognition, animal sexual and reproductive behavior, and health psychology. According to former Provost Paul Hosier, Bruce “seems to have a natural ability to weave an educational experience to achieve maximum impact…her peers regard her creative talents, her willingness to share her gifts and her passion for experiential learning as extraordinary.” Bruce is the third UNCW faculty member to receive this prestigious award.

Andrew Mickley’s current research interests include brain development and the neural mechanisms of learning and memory. Mickley is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, spending much of his military career doing research in the brain sciences. At Baldwin-Wallace, in a neuroscience program that Mickley himself helped to create, students become immediately involved in all aspects of laboratory research, from project design to data collection to grant writing. Says Richard Durst, President of Baldwin-Wallace College, “Mickley treats every moment with a student as a teaching opportunity and, when not with students, he is about the business of creating new learning opportunities for them.”

More information about the awards is available at www.carnegiefoundation.org. Congratulations to our colleagues!