Faculty Honors
Arts and Sciences is home to outstanding teachers and researchers
College Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award
Gerald (Gerry) Shapiro, Professor, Department of English
Gerry is a highly regarded author of several collections of short stories, From Hunger, Bad Jews and Other Stories, and Little Men. In addition to these volumes, he has published upwards of forty individual short stories in literary journals. He has received awards for his writing from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Society of Midland Authors. He has also won the very prestigious Pushcart Prize for Fiction and the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize for Jewish Fiction. In 2001, he was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
Professor Shapiro’s work ranks among the best being published in the U.S. His writing has been noticed and reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to his fiction writing, he has completed two screenplays. One of these, “King of the Corner,” was produced into a film by actor/director Peter Riegert and was distributed nationally.
Gerry’s stories and screenplays deal with the ethical and social dilemmas of the modern American Jew, who feels himself at odds with the world around him. He writes with an extraordinary amount of humor and psychological subtlety, and he brings these qualities into the classroom as well. In his 20 years at UNL, Gerry has mentored students in fiction writing and fostered a love of literature among generations of students.
Evgeny Tsymbal, Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Dr. Tsymbal has risen quickly to the rank of full professor at UNL, due to his outstanding performance in research. He is one of the world’s leading theorists in spin-transport phenomena, also known as “spintronics,” which is an area that is anticipated to lead to the next technology revolution. One of his colleagues noted, “The hallmark of Evgeny’s work is a brilliant clarity of ideas providing a solid base for new directions in research.”
Dr. Tsymbal’s articles have appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including “Science,” “Physical Review Letters” and “The Journal of Physics.” Additionally, a person could go blind reading the list of his peer-reviewed and contributed papers. We are extremely lucky to host a scholar of his caliber at the University of Nebraska, and in our College. Evgeny ranks at the top of his field in terms of the creativity, breadth and significance of his work.
Willa Cather/Charles Bessey Professorship
Dawn Braithwaite, Department of Communication Studies
As a professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Communication Studies, Dawn O. Braithwaite focuses on how people in personal and family relationships communicate during times of family transitions and challenges. She studies family rituals, dialectical contradictions and change, and communicating social support for stepfamilies, fictive kin, elderly couples and people with disabilities. Her goal is to help her students expand their repertoire of communicative choices. She believes that communication theory and research are practical, and that by blending knowledge and application, her students develop varied ways of understanding, behaving, and communicating to meet their needs in a diverse and complex world.
She joined the UNL faculty in 1998. Raised in Chicago, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and earned degrees from California State University Long Beach and CSU-Fullerton. She also holds an Associate of Arts from Golden West College, Huntington Beach, California.
Charles Bessey Professorship
Gerry Shapiro, Professor, Department of English
Writer Gerald Shapiro has published three collections of short fiction: From Hunger (University of Missouri Press, 1993); Bad Jews (Zoland Books, 1999; reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, 2004); and Little Men (Ohio State University Press, 2004). He co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film "King of the Corner" (2005), which premiered in Lincoln and played in theaters nationwide. He regularly teaches fiction writing, Jewish-American fiction and 20th Century American fiction and has directed the Norman and Bernice Harris Center for Judaic Studies and coordinated the Creative Writing Program in the English Department.
Of his teaching, Shapiro says, “What's valuable about my courses (this is true for all English Department courses, I think) is that they ask students to exercise their imagination, and through that exercise, to strengthen their ability to see the world through eyes other than their own.” A member of the UNL faculty since 1987, Shapiro earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Kansas and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachuetts-Amherst.
Hazel R. McClymont Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award
Calvin (Cal) Garbin, Professor of psychology.
Dr. Garbin has taught at UNL for more than 20 years, and in that time has made countless valuable and extraordinary contributions in teaching. As a teacher of Advanced Research Methods, Psychometric Methods and Teaching Methods for Psychology (among others,) his student evaluation numbers are outstanding; in fact, his department chair noted that the exceedingly high average scores on Dr. Garbin’s student evaluations are, to his knowledge, unprecedented in the department’s history. Written student comments in course evaluations consistently marvel at his curricular innovations that make difficult quantitative topics easy to understand. Dr. Garbin’s outstanding classroom instruction is also evidenced by the teaching awards he has received: In 2002, he received the ASUN Outstanding Educator of the Year Award, and in 2003 he became a member of the UNL Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
Dr. Garbin also does a substantial amount of supervision and mentoring of students outside the classroom. He is, in particular, committed to creating meaningful undergraduate research opportunities. He has supervised the presentation of over 400 undergraduate research presentations at local or regional conferences. He has chaired or co-chaired dozens of senior and honors thesis committees. He has also served on more than 100 dissertation committees within the psychology department alone.
I could spend all afternoon listing Dr. Garbin’s accomplishments at UNL, as well as regionally and nationally. He has served as president of the Nebraska Psychological Society and co-chaired the University Teaching Council. He is universally respected by his peers, and is for many a professional role model and a highly valued teaching and research mentor.
College Distinguished Teaching Award
Audrey Atkin, Professor of Biological Sciences
Audrey Atkin believes her research into gene regulation and signaling mechanisms complements her teaching of biology to freshmen, seniors and graduate students.
“Biology is impacting so many different aspects of our everyday lives from biofuels and genetically modified organisms to new vaccines, and better understanding and treatment of genetic diseases,” she said. “In my classes, my goal is to help my students develop the knowledge base as well as skill and confidence to acquire and use their knowledge about biology in both their personal and professional lives. I believe each of my students has the potential to successfully pursue their dreams. I recognize that each of us has unique skills, interests and ways of learning, so I also create opportunities for my students to understand their personal learning style and develop skills to take full advantage of their strengths.”
Atkin joined UNL in 1996. She holds a B.S. from the University of Guelph, Canada, and a PhD. from the University of Alberta, Canada.
Robert Brooke, Professor, Department of English
With expertise in composition and rhetoric, Robert Brooke directs the Nebraska Writing Project, a network of teachers kindergarten-through-college committed to the improvement of writing in the state’s schools. As the state’s only site of the National Writing Project, the Nebraska Writing Project supports teachers in developing more effective writing pedagogy. Brooke reaches over 900 of the state’s teachers each year. The project’s core principle is that teachers who are writers themselves make better teachers of writing. Brooke’s teachers are accomplished writers, and their students routinely score highly on all writing achievement evaluations and are frequently guided to publish themselves.
Brooke has been at UNL 22 years. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Gonzaga University, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota.
Tom Gannon, Professor, Department of English
Thomas C. Gannon joined the faculties of English and the Ethnic Studies Institute (Native American Studies) in 2003. His main areas of research interest are Native American literatures (particular those of Great Plains tribes), British Romanticism, ecology and animal rights vis-à-vis literature, and contemporary critical theory. In part because of his interest in the specific theory of ecofeminism, he is now also a member of the Women's and Gender Studies faculty.
Gannon said, “My most deeply held pedagogical values include those of diversity and cross-cultural understanding, in contradistinction to the opposing (and dangerous) platitudes of ethnocentrism and monoculturalism. So my literature and criticism courses often involve an exploration of the "voices" of the Other—of race, class, gender, and species.”
Gannon has created a number of web publications, which he uses in his teaching and scholarly activities. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe (Mniconjou Lakota), he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, and a master’s from the University of South Dakota.
The Academy of Distinguished Teachers Award
Amy Burnett, Department of History
As one of three co-coordinators of UNL’s Peer Review of Teaching Project, Amy Nelson Burnett has found a parallel between her research specialty, the Protestant Reformation in German-speaking Europe, and her profession. Early Protestant pastors were essentially teachers concerned with communicating their message to their audiences.
“In thinking about my own teaching, in helping other UNL faculty reflect on their teaching, and in studying the teaching of pastors in the past, one of my chief questions is how one can not only transmit information but also help learners understand and apply what they’ve learned,” she said. “One of my goals as a teacher is to help students see that history is not just memorizing names and dates; it is learning how to interpret the past and developing an appreciation for cultures and outlooks that are different from those of 21st-century America.”
A faculty member for 18 years, Burnett holds a B.A., and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
