Meet the 2024 award recipients
Learn more about the faculty and staff who were recognized for excellence.
Adam Downing, Extension agent
Adam Downing has served as a regional Extension forestry agent since 2001, a new position for the Northern District at the time. Over the past two decades, Downing has developed a diverse and impactful program to meet natural resource challenges across the urban to rural gradient using a variety of approaches and audiences. The most rewarding part of his work is in partnering with collaborators and colleagues to help individuals, families, and communities make sound decisions regarding the forests and natural resources.
Mark S. Reiter, Extension specialist/administrator
Mark S. Reiter began working at Virginia Tech in summer 2008 as a soils and nutrient management Extension specialist at the Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Extension Center. Crops of focus include fresh market tomato, potato, snap beans, soybeans, wheat, corn, and any other crop important to growers. Nutrients researched include nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, and fertilizer additives that make systems more efficient. Reiter works with Virginia Cooperative Extension faculty from local offices, other Agricultural Research and Extension Centers, and Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus to ensure a balanced, targeted, researched, and wide-casting Extension program to address local, statewide, and regional emerging issues. Experiential learning is of utmost importance and is utilized for producers and industry through field days, demonstrations, and other first-hand impact events. Reiter also enjoys teaching and currently co-leads a study abroad course and teaches an online graduate course.
Virginia Tech String Project, Outreach Excellence - Team Achievement
Molly Wilkens-Reed, Alan Weinstein, and Yi-Wen Evans lead the Virginia Tech String Project. This program provides string instrument instruction to children and adults throughout Southwest Virginia and serves as a valuable teaching opportunity and paid experiential learning lab for Virginia Tech undergraduate and graduate music students. Virginia Tech String Project, founded in 2007, is the signature community enrichment program for the Department of Music. Its mission is to provide high-quality string instruction for the community while preparing students for success in their futures as music educators. The program is a member of the National String Project Consortium and was named the 2021 String Project of the Year by the American String Teachers Association.
Erin Ling, Outreach Excellence - Individual
Erin Ling is a senior Extension associate in biological systems engineering. Ling coordinates the Virginia Household Water Quality Program for Virginia Cooperative Extension, which offers affordable water testing and education to Virginia's 1.6 million private well and spring users and youth audiences. Ling works with collaborating faculty and students to conduct applied research related to drinking water quality, emerging contaminants, and water access and equity. Ling is a fellow of the Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute as well as of the 2024 College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Global Opportunity Initiative, which culminates in a trip to Ethiopia in June.
Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, Research
Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, professor of psychology in the College of Science, is the director of the JK Lifespan Development Lab and conducts research on pathways to adaptation despite adversity to understand both typical development and psychopathology. Her recent research has focused on risk and protective factors related to young people’s risky decision-making, substance use, and mental health. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. Through her work, Kim-Spoon appreciates being able to serve young people by generating scientific information aimed at preventing dysfunctional development.
Patrick Huber, Research
Patrick Huber, professor in the Department of Physics and director of the Center for Neutrino Physics, conducts research that connects very basic questions about the universe, neutrinos, and our own origin to applications of what we have learned about neutrinos to problems of nuclear security and arms control in a global context.
Wayne Scales, International Research
Professor Wayne Scales is the J. Byron Maupin Endowed Chair of Engineering at Virginia Tech. He joined the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1992 as founding director of the Center for Space Science and Engineering Research, also known as Space@VT. Scales also served as co-director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in remote sensing and is an affiliate professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. He also is currently associate vice provost of research and diversity, and his role includes development of strategic research and educational partnerships with minority-serving institutions and historically Black colleges and universities. His research focus is in the area of space plasma turbulence with applications to active space experiments, natural space plasma turbulence in the ionosphere and magnetosphere, dusty space plasmas, and global navigation satellite system remote sensing.
Diggs Teaching Scholar Award
The Diggs Teaching Scholars Award was established in 1992 and is presented annually by the Center for Instructional Development and Educational Research to recognize exceptional contributions to the teaching program and learning environment. Diggs Teaching Scholars are invited to lead the Diggs Roundtable, a series of presentations and a discussion of their innovative teaching.
Heidi M. Williams
For the past seven years, Heidi Williams, collegiate assistant professor of sociology, has taught a variety of courses in sociology and criminology at Virginia Tech. Her research investigating child well-being and extended kin caregiving led to the development of the course Family and Crime, which explores the effects of incarceration on family relationships and systems, demonstrating that the criminal justice system's reach extends far beyond the person incarcerated. This spring, she piloted a pedagogical partnership in her Gender, Family and Crime in Appalachia special topics course. These partnerships allow the professor and student partner to reciprocally collaborate on course design, pedagogical approaches, implementation, and student success. Based on feedback from her student partner, Gianna Doering, and enrolled students in the course, the pedagogical partnership has allowed students to take a more active role in their learning by suggesting modifications throughout the course — an outcome they attribute to having the partnership in the classroom.
Jenna A. Booth
Jenna A. Booth, program assistant at Adult Day Services, a program offered through the Engagement Center for Creative Aging, delivers daily opportunities for older adults to engage in purposeful programming such as creative art, music, gardening, intergenerational programming, reminiscence, exercises, and more. She extended her abilities not only to offer meaningful programming, but also has taken on training to be certified direct care staff and also a medication aide. She is involved in all aspects of the center and is known as the "Jenna of all trades." For example, with the help of the Master Gardener Program of the NRV, Booth redeveloped the horticulture program at Adult Day Services and gave the raised plant beds around Wallace Hall a much-needed overhaul. She is also actively working on streamlining the inquiry and on-boarding of new participants to help meet the needs of caregivers more quickly.
Patricia Williams
Patricia Williams, a laboratory specialist and facility manager at the School of Animal Sciences, has worked for the department since 2004. Her background in analytical chemistry and laboratory management has enabled her to effectively guide graduate student and faculty members with their research protocol development. With the department nearly doubled in size, her job description evolved to include many facets of department administration including compliance and procurement. Twenty years later, she is still excited to assist new students and faculty as they take on fresh challenges in the dynamic world of animal science.
Tamara Cherry-Clarke
Tamara Cherry-Clarke currently serves as senior assistant dean of students in Student Affairs. She started her journey at Virginia Tech in fall 2015 as an assistant director in Career and Professional Development. In 2017, she was promoted to the role of assistant director in Student Conduct, where she served the department for almost four years before being selected as the assistant dean for First-Generation Student Support. In that role, she launched the new living-learning community for first-generation students and created a campus community committed to being “first-gen ready.” She elevated the visibility of the first-generation student population and successfully created initiatives that recently boasted a 1.2 percent increase in the retention of first-generation students. In her current role, Tamara leads the Student Success and Engagement team in the Dean of Students Office, supporting the assistant deans for First-Generation Student Success and Interfaith Initiatives.
Roberto A. Silva
Roberto A. Silva, formerly the studio manager and now the head of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC Health Sciences and Technology Library in Roanoke, has been with Virginia Tech since 2020. In his capacity within University Libraries, Roberto aids students, faculty, and staff in achieving their academic, research, and educational objectives by facilitating access to collections, services, and spaces in a creative, thoughtful, and collaborative manner. Continuously advancing Virginia Tech's land-grant mission, he extends access and services to individuals beyond the university. He also oversees two book clubs in partnership with Casa Latina, a nonprofit organization in the Roanoke Valley dedicated to meeting the immediate needs of the Spanish-speaking community. Roberto actively cultivates a culture of diversity and inclusion by fostering environments where all individuals experience a sense of belonging. He was born and raised in Lima, Peru.
Career Outfitters, Group Award
The Career Outfitters program was founded in 2013 as a way to provide undergraduate and graduate students with access to free professional attire. For the last decade, the program has served students in many forms including annual/bi-annual shopping events, one-on-one student appointments, pop-up shops, and private workshops and events. Career Outfitters has grown from a Career Closet to a full-service program with multiple options for student access throughout the academic year. In addition to providing students access to free professional attire, students are able to work with trained student interns to receive individualized style, size, and fit advice; information on other Career and Professional Development programs and resources; information on community resources, such as tailoring and dry cleaning; and assistance unlocking professional dress codes. Career Outfitters strives to create a welcoming and inclusive environment where students feel respected as they explore and develop their own professional brand and identity.
DEI Committee, Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Group Award
Tatiana Daychman, Niyousha Hosseinichimeh, Myounghoon “Philart” Jeon, Rohit Kannan, Jacob Kerstiens, Chris Kwaramba, Tony Lee, Cassidy Nelson, and Rafael Patrick of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee of the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering have demonstrated a steadfast commitment to supporting faculty, staff, and students in their engagement with DEI initiatives. Their work includes incorporating DEI-relevant discussions into every faculty meeting and staff meeting, hosting an inclusion and belonging meeting with every job candidate and establishing evaluation guidelines for the search committee; supporting student organizations such as Women in Industrials and System Engineering and Women in Transportation Seminar by providing resources and opportunities for their development, and supporting students to attend relevant conference, such the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy Conference and The National Society of Black Engineers. These efforts reflect their dedication to fostering an inclusive community for all members within and beyond the department.
University Sporn Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Subjects
Sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the Virginia Tech Academy for Teaching Excellence, the Sporn Award for Teaching Introductory Subjects recognizes a Virginia Tech faculty member nominated and selected by undergraduate students.
Michael Berg
Michael Berg is an advanced instructor in the Department of Chemistry. See his page.
Staff Career Achievement Award
Created in 2011 to recognize retiring staff members, the Staff Career Achievement Award is presented annually to individuals who retired the previous year and who distinguished themselves through exemplary performance and service during their university career. Nominees must have worked a minimum of 10 years at Virginia Tech.
Julia Acton
Julia Acton, lead administrative manager in Pamplin Undergraduate Programs, retired July 1, 2023, after 45 years at Virginia Tech. Throughout her time at the university, she welcomed the opportunity to interact with a team of wonderful and supportive people. Acton started her career with the university in 1978 in Newman Library in the acquisitions department, then moved into an office specialist’s role in Schultz Dining Hall, and then moved to the administrative office in Dining Services in Owens Hall. In 1987, she moved to the Department of Finance in the Pamplin College of Business, typing academic manuscripts and providing faculty support before taking over as head secretary of the department. She moved to Pamplin Undergraduate Programs in 2002 as an enrollment services specialist, eventually being promoted to lead administrative manager.
James T. Custis Jr.
James T. Custis Jr. retired as the agricultural farm manager at the Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Extension Center after more than 38 years at Virginia Tech. He found it rewarding to be an integral member of a team that worked to improve the production of vegetable and field crops in Virginia and beyond. Living on site, there were no eight-hour days. Instead, the job of farm manager quickly became a way of life. Over the years, Custis had the privilege of working with many devoted researchers, promising graduate students, and hardworking support staff. He was able to farm the land without the financial risk farmers face with every crop. Instead, he was able to grow a wide variety of vegetable and grain crops in small plots with specialized equipment.
Bruce Harper
Bruce Harper '78 retired as the first and only Virginia Tech webmaster. He was hired 37 years ago as a wage employee "for three to six months or until project ends." The project, putting policies and procedures on a system on the IBM mainframe, grew far beyond the initial plans for the system. That information put Virginia Tech far ahead when it was migrated into the then-new World Wide Web. He was also involved in university governance over the years, from the major revision in the early '90s to the beginnings of the Virginia Tech Staff Senate and finishing out as secretary of the Staff Senate.
Cathy Lally
Cathy Lally spent her entire university career of 30-plus years providing support in Alumni Relations until 2015, when was merged into the Advancement Division. She started her career as a part-time receptionist, then moved through several full-time positions with increased responsibilities including program support technician, assistant to the vice president for alumni relations, and coordinator of board and alumni relations. She managed or provided support for various Alumni Association programs and events including the Alumni Association board of directors, alumni chapter and reunion programs, volunteer management, special programs including Summer Around the Drillfield, A Day in the Life of College Admissions, and Student Recognition Banquet. As assistant to the vice president, she managed the alumni awards program, human resources functions, and supervised several support positions.
John Waid
John Waid has been committed to the Virginia Tech community since the day he was sworn in as an officer with the university's police department. He worked tirelessly over the years to ensure community members were safe and also to ensure they felt comfortable while interacting with the police department. Waid never saw his job as anything else but a team effort and never sought to receive individual praise for activities that he clearly was responsible for completing.
Randy Waldron
Randy Waldron started at Virginia Tech in 1985 in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics as a lab mechanic. Several months later, he moved to what is now the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as a lab instrument maker. Over the years, he’s had the opportunity to work with many faculty and students in the research environment building and design apparatuses for their research goals. Additionally, he has worked in the Manufacturing Process Lab with undergraduate students.
University Award for Excellence in Teaching
The University Award for Excellence in Teaching is presented annually to honor two Virginia Tech faculty members for teaching excellence. Award recipients are selected by the university's Academy of Teaching Excellence and are chosen from among those faculty members who have received Certificates of Teaching Excellence from their respective colleges during the preceding three years.
Katie Carmichael
Katie Carmichael, associate professor in the Department of English and co-director of the Virginia Tech Speech Lab, teaches within the language sciences program. Her teaching and research both prioritize mentoring of undergraduates with interests in linguistics as she seeks to empower them to pursue their inherent curiosity about language, mobilizing their linguistic intuitions and critical thinking skills in the process. She co-created the language sciences Pathways minor, which culminates in a capstone class called Research in the Language Sciences that features innovative cross-college collaboration with the Department of Statistics. Carmichael is currently the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation-funded project on sociolinguistic variation in New Orleans English through which she has co-developed a dialect awareness curriculum targeted at improving literacy rates in New Orleans elementary schools.
Rachel Diana
Rachel Diana is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology who studies the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of human memory. She is the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience and Biopsychology graduate training area. Her research has included investigations of the retrieval processes operating in recognition memory, developing and testing a model of medial temporal lobe function in episodic memory, and identifying beneficial encoding strategies. Diana currently has funding from the National Science Foundation to investigate how our understanding of the hippocampal memory system can be applied to improve learning. She is passionate about sharing efficient learning strategies with incoming Virginia Tech students to help them be successful in their college coursework.
Volunteer Recognition - Commonwealth of Virginia Campaign committee
The Commonwealth of Virginia Campaign (CVC) Volunteer Recognition award is presented to the CVC Steering Team Chair upon competition of their term, which is typically two to four years. The chair leads the CVC Steering Team to establish the campaign goal, provide training to campaign representatives and promote the campaign to the broader university community by speaking to different employee groups.
Edward F. Lener
Edward F. Lener is a double Hokie, and he has worked at Virginia Tech for over 30 years. He originally started as a science reference librarian but now serves as director of collections in the University Libraries. Since 2009, he also has acted as Virginia Tech's representative on the Collections Committee of the Virtual Library of Virginia, Virginia’s academic library consortium. Lener helps run the library's annual recognition event for Virginia Tech authors and is a book author himself as a co-author of “Graduate Research: A Guide for Students in the Sciences,” which is held in over 1,350 libraries around the world. Lerner has served on the Faculty Senate, on University Council, and in several other governance positions. His longest term of service though has been in connection with the Commonwealth of Virginia Campaign, where he began as a departmental campaign rep starting in the late 1990s.
William E. Wine Award
The William E. Wine Award was established in 1957 by the Virginia Tech Alumni Association in memory of William E. Wine, Class of 1904, who was a former rector of the Board of Visitors and Alumni Association president. Following a college-level selection process of candidates nominated by students, faculty, and alumni, each college may put forth one nominee. From this group, three faculty members are selected annually. Each Wine Award winner receives $2,000 and automatic induction into the Academy of Teaching Excellence.
Ozzie Abaye
Ozzie Abaye is the Thomas B. Hutcheson Professor of Agronomy in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. At Virginia Tech for over 30 years, Abaye has been a leader in the innovation of teaching courses about crop science both inside the classroom and beyond it. In addition to curricular innovation and her extensive work as a student advisor and mentor, Abaye helped lead the revamping of the undergraduate general education Pathways program and developed and led study abroad programs in South Africa, Senegal, Nepal, Australia, and Ecuador as well as service-learning projects for students in Ghana, Thailand, and across the United States, where students learn about regional crops and foods and their impact on culture. Abaye has also made a significant contribution to agricultural education in Africa. She coordinated an effort to upgrade seed and crop education at five universities in Senegal.
Dana M. Hawley
Dana M. Hawley, professor of biological sciences, studies the ecology of infectious diseases in wild birds. She loves sharing her enthusiasm for both birds and pathogens with students inside and outside of the classroom, where she has mentored over 65 undergraduates in avian disease research. Inside the classroom, she uses birds as a gateway to the natural world more broadly, sparking student curiosity by using hands-on learning techniques and engaging multimedia. She is also a strong advocate for science communication to the broader public, and her students complete community outreach projects as course assignments. She believes that some of the best learning happens when students are challenged to become teachers themselves.
Stephen M. Martin
Stephen M. Martin, associate professor and the W. S. “Pete” White Chair for Innovation in Engineering Education, has been a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering since 2006. During his 18 years at Virginia Tech, he has taught over 50 courses and over 3,000 students at the graduate and undergraduate level in the chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering. Martin has led the capstone Chemical Engineering Laboratory course for 17 years, an intensive hands-on course taken by chemical engineering undergraduates in the summer between their junior and senior years. He has been instrumental in numerous improvements to the laboratory course as well as developing a study abroad program for students to take the course at the Ruhr University of Bochum in Germany. Martin also leads an active research laboratory that focuses on the development of advanced materials for separations such as water desalination and carbon capture.
XCaliber Award for Excellence in Technology Assisted Teaching and Learning
Established in 1996 by the Office of the Provost, the XCaliber Award is presented annually by Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies to recognize individual faculty members or teams of faculty and staff who integrate technology in teaching and learning. The award celebrates innovative, student-centered approaches.
Farrokh Jazizadeh
Farrokh Jazizadeh is associate professor in the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. Jazizadeh’s research looks at the intersection of human-centered intelligent environments, data-driven informatics, infrastructure operational analytics, and built environment sustainability and adaptability. Among his leadership efforts, Jazizadeh has chaired the Technical Program Committees of the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation in 2019 and the American Society of Civil Engineers’ International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering in 2024. Jazizadeh's educational contributions center around teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels with an emphasis on computational thinking and built environment information modeling.
Megan A. Rippy
Megan A. Rippy is an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering. Her work focuses on characterizing and modeling green infrastructure services and their socio-ecological drivers. Her research combines approaches that span multiple disciplines, requiring integration of new technologies such as virtual reality with ecological theory and emerging social science tools that can be used to “map” human perceptions, such as fuzzy cognitive mapping. She has worked nationally and internationally with green stormwater infrastructure and is dedicated to providing multidisciplinary educational experiences to engineering students that help them understand the ecological foundations of nature-based systems, the environmental justice implications of green infrastructure siting and design practices, and the myriad opportunities that new tools like virtual reality present for green infrastructure design.