Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and journal papers that contribute to their field and highlight their expertise. We feature those accomplishments in this section.
College of Arts and Humanities
Mario Congreve, lecturer of digital media arts and staff producer of mediated instruction and distance learning, was cinematographer and co-producer with director Glen Gebhard and writer Frank Turano on the documentary “Greetings from Fire Island, Long Island, NY,” which has been awarded the J. Stuart Blackton Award for Best Documentary at the Long Island Film Festival.
Gilah Hirsch, professor of art, is among the artists whose works have been selected for the 2013 “Incognito” exhibit and benefit art sale on Saturday, May 11, in support of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Her studio is also part of a bus tour as part of the “This Side of the 405” exhibition at the Otis College of Art and Design’s Ben Maltz Gallery. The first tour took place April 20, and a second tour is scheduled for June 1.
Avrum Marco Turk, director and professor emeritus of negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding, has been selected to a seven-member American Psychological Association (APA) Presidential Task Force for its Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence: Peace Psychology Division to develop a research agenda on abortion from the peace psychology perspective.
Turk also was recognized recently for outstanding contribution as co-creator of the online Master of Advanced Study (MAS) Program in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society in the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology. MAS, which Turk helped develop, became the first entirely online degree in the UC system when it was launched in 2001.
College of Business Administration and Public Policy
Kirti Sawhney Celly, professor of marketing and management, won Best Paper Award at the Marketing Educators’ Association 36th annual conference, “Marketing Education: New Challenges and Opportunities” in April for “Are Many Choices Demotivating?: When More Choices are Better in Marketing Courses,” which she co-wrote with CSU Northridge professors David Ackerman and Barbara Gross. The paper argues that for certain types of choice tasks more choice is better, as evidenced by their research on student perceptions related to the desirability and value of courses. Students with more choices perceived courses as more valuable to their future careers and had more positive perceptions of the quality and fairness of the course instructor. Celly also chaired a session that examined the theoretical and practical approaches to examining online courses, including use of social media.
Larry Press, professor of information system and operation management, was presented with the 2013 Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) Classic Award in the area of Information Technology at the MERLOT/Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference in April. The award honors individuals for excellence in peer-reviewed online resources. Press was recognized for his digital literacy teaching modules Zen and the Art of Internet Reading (and Writing).
College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences
Thomas Landefeld, professor of biology and pre-health adviser, received an Excellence in Service award for his participation in Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center’s Hippocrates Circle Program, a mentorship program that aims to empower at-risk middle school students to believe they can be physicians.
Landefeld also continues to visit universities through the country, giving talks to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and Minority Access to Minority Careers (MARC) Undergraduate Student Training in Academic Research (USTAR) students. He gave a seminar, “Once You Graduate from SSU: What’s Next Let me Help” at Savannah State University in March and “You are Getting an ASU Degree: What Next? Let me Help” to at Alabama State University in April. During his visits he also meets with key administration and STEM faculty.
Sue Needham, professor and chair of anthropology, has been named an International Visiting Scholar for the nonprofit Teach Cambodia and will spend the summer in Cambodia conducting research on Cambodian shadow puppet theater and developing curriculum for an ethnographic field school.
Expert Quotes
Recent quotes and/or media interviews in the media from faculty
“Teach children [about money] while they are in elementary school. Don’t wait until they go to middle or high school. By then, bad habits are formed, and it may be too difficult to unravel them.” – Prakash Dheeriya, professor of finance, quoted in “3 Signs Your Child Could Be a Future Financial Disaster” (U.S. News and World Report, April 9).
Rama Malladi, adjunct faculty of finance, was the featured experts in Q&A on Bankrate.com, “Why Consumers Flock to Prepaid Debit Cards.” The article was shared on Yahoo Finance and Fox Business.
“What they’ve done so far with the Internet is they’ve taken old face-to-face classrooms and textbooks and tried to duplicate that online. Until now, online education has put old wine in a new bottle. But now we’re starting to put some new wine into that new bottle.” – Larry Press, quoted in “Professors: Massive Online Courses Shouldn’t Be Worth College Credit” (Daily Breeze, April 9 and San Bernardino Sun, April 10)
“Perhaps our distinctive fondness for the handgun has made us more strangely accepting of the fact that any of us can be shot. Virtually at any time. Based on our gun-control proposals, how we are shot seems more important than how often” –Frank Strier, professor emeritus of accounting, finance and law, in “Going After the Wrong Guns: It’s Handguns, Not Assault Rifles, that Endanger U.S.,” an opinion piece he authored (Newark Star-Ledger, Sunday edition, March 31).
Faculty members are encouraged to send accomplishments for publication in Dateline to abentleysmith@csudh.edu
