CEAT presents Halliburton Faculty Honors

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Professors who advanced wireless communications and tissue regeneration as engineering curriculum and research emphases at Oklahoma State University have been presented the 2005 Halliburton Faculty Excellence Awards.

Sundar Madihally and Jong-Moon Chung joined Camille DeYong and Mark Pruitt as this year’s recipients of the awards that acknowledge extraordinary contributions in instruction, outreach and research in OSU’s College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. Initially named during May commencement, honorees formally receive a plaque and a stipend during the college’s annual fall faculty meeting.

The Excellent Teacher and Excellent Young Teacher are selected by a group of student and faculty representatives. A peer committee determines the Outstanding Faculty Member and Outstanding Young Faculty Member, recognitions for distinction beyond the classroom. Honorees in both categories, however, excel in all facets of instruction, research, mentoring and professional and volunteer service, according to David Thompson, CEAT associate dean for instruction.

Chung, the Outstanding Young Faculty Member Award recipient, is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition to creating new courses to bolster the school’s wireless communications curriculum, he founded its Advanced Communications System Engineering Laboratory and the Oklahoma Communication Laboratory for Networking and Bioengineering .

Since he joined the faculty in 1999, Chung has helped secure more than $2.5 million in research funding, including competitive contracts to develop a wireless communications badge for U.S. Navy sailors with Nomadics Inc. engineers. His honors include recently being named a 2005 Regents Distinguished Research Award winner.

In less than three years at OSU, Madihally has taught six different courses including chemical reactor design, unit operations and introduction to biomedical engineering. The Excellent Young Teacher Award and 2005 President’s Leadership Award winner advises two OSU student organizations, including a dynamic Indian Student Association and an American Institute of Chemical Engineers student chapter that perennially ranks among the ten best in the nation.

This past April, OSU chapter members placed first, second and third among teams vying to represent AIChE’s Mid-American Region in the National Chem-E Car Competition. Since only the top three Mid-American teams are sent the finals, OSU’s unprecedented success under Madihally has compelled contest organizers to reevaluate national qualifying.

In the laboratory, the assistant professor in the School of Chemical Engineering is developing new bioengineering techniques to grow heart valves, blood vessels and other tissues from umbilical stem cells.

Pruitt, an associate professor in the Construction Management Technology department, received the Outstanding Faculty Award. Students acknowledge not only the rigor of the courses he instructs but also his use of the latest technologies to teach about contract documents, computer aided drafting, computer estimating, construction law and timber and form design.

Pruitt has coached construction management scholars to numerous regional titles in design/build competitions against their peers from other schools. Since he joined the faculty in 1992, he has also overseen students’ construction of the CMT department’s laboratory building in the entrepreneurial engineering park northwest of campus.

Pruitt holds advanced degrees in both architecture and construction management and enjoys high demand in the private sector as a professional consultant.

DeYong, who received the Excellent Teacher Award, instructs five different courses in quality management and engineering ergonomics, continuing the quality tradition established in the oldest industrial engineering and management program west of the Mississippi River. The associate professor’s honors for teaching include the Advancia Excellence in Distance Learning Award and repeat Outstanding Instructor ratings by National Technological University students.

Outside the classroom, DeYong helped lead the reinstatement at OSU of the Reaching Engineering and Architecture Career Heights program, a summer academy in which young women are introduced to careers in high tech fields. The 2003 President’s Service Award recipient has also served as faculty advisor for students in the Institute of Industrial Engineers at OSU and in the region.

DeYong holds the rank of senior judge for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards, the standard in organizational and business honors for customer satisfaction and performance excellence. She also serves as faculty coordinator of the Aging Systems Sustainment and Enabling Technologies program, the government-academic-business partnership initiated at OSU to address Department of Defense procurement problems.

The Halliburton Awards program is the keystone of the relationship between Halliburton and the CEAT that dates to 1960 when, still headquartered in Duncan, Oklahoma, the company began to fund laboratory development and research on the OSU-Stillwater campus, according to Dr. Karl Reid, CEAT dean. The faculty recognition program at OSU is the oldest in the nation actively supported by the Halliburton Foundation.