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Recently, six faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences received funded awards for their dedication to undergraduate teaching while pursing innovative research in their respective academic areas. Here’s a brief look at their research and the awards they received.

Jeremy Best
Department of History
Brian and Rondi Gardner Faculty Award

Historian Jeremy Best, associate professor of history, studies the history of race, religion, and culture in 19th- and 20th-century Germany. Through his research, Best aims to develop and improve our understanding of the past to recognize and explain the world we live in today. He is especially interested in the history of imagination; the construction of meaning by people and institutions in the past through fantasy, the articulation of those fantasies through cultural expression, and the transformation of that meaning into concrete policy behavior and goals.

The Brian and Rondi Gardner Faculty Award supports outstanding history and political science faculty who demonstrate exemplary service and dedication to students at Iowa State.

Lynna Chu
Department of Statistics
Cassling Family Faculty Award for Early Achievement in Teaching

Lynna Chu, assistant professor of statistics, develops rigorous and robust statistical tools that practitioners use to analyze modern datasets. These statistical tools require few assumptions about the underlying data distribution, making them easy off-the-shelf tools that can be applied to a broad range of problems. For example, Chu is developing disease surveillance monitoring tools that can quickly detect when there is a disease outbreak, while considering both the spatial and temporal dependencies of disease outbreaks.

The Cassling Family Faculty Award for Early Achievement in Teaching was established by Dr. Randal and Lori Cassling to recognize outstanding faculty members who are at various stages in their undergraduate teaching careers.

Karen Kedrowski
Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics
Whitaker-Lindgren Faculty Fellowship in Political Science

Karen Kedrowski, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics and professor of political science, conducts research on American politics, civic engagement, and health policy. Her civic engagement work helps empower young citizens to participate fully in civil society, and her gender research highlights the different ways women and men understand and engage in the political world.

The Whitaker-Lindgren Faculty Fellowship in Political Science is possible through the generous donation of Mary Whitaker-Lindgren and Douglas Lindgren, long-time supporters of Iowa State’s Department of Political Science. Faculty recipients use the funds to advance and disseminate research that positively impacts political science students and the department.

Michéle Schaal
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Cassling Family Faculty Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching

Michéle Schaal, associate professor of French and women’s and gender studies, specializes in 21st-century French women’s writing and feminisms. She has become the leading expert on fictions by authors Virginie Despentes, Wendy Delorme, and Claire Legendre. Schaal’s scholarship highlights how art can never be separated from its context, and how fiction also constitutes a way of understanding the world and fellow human beings.

The Cassling Family Faculty Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching was established by Dr. Randal and Lori Cassling to recognize outstanding faculty members who are at various stages in their undergraduate teaching careers.

Department of World Languages and Cultures
Shakeshaft Master Teacher in Humanities and Social Sciences

Jean-Pierre Taoutel, teaching professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, has dedicated his career to teaching students in numerous study abroad programs. He currently serves as director of the “Cathedrals of France” LAS Global Seminar in Paris, the “En France” French language program in Paris, and the co-director of the “Culture and Economic Diversification in the United Arab Emirates” program in the U.A.E. Previously, he was director of the Regents’ Summer Study Abroad Program in Lyon, France (2005, 2007), and co-directed the “Andalusia: Intersections of Cultures” LAS Global Seminar in Spain and Morocco (2018). Taoutel has also directed the Middlebury Monterey Language Academy Arabic Summer Program (2008-2010).

The Shakeshaft Master Teacher in Humanities and Social Sciences award was established in memory of Jerry Shakeshaft, a long-time political science professor at Iowa State who was dedicated to the principle of undergraduate teaching.

Shira Zerbib
Department of Mathematics
Scott Hanna Faculty Fellowship

Shira Zerbib, associate professor of mathematics, works in combinatorics, an area of mathematics that concerns the study of finite discrete structures. Her research addresses problems related to the behavior of families of sets, where she applies sophisticated tools from other areas of mathematics to understand how the sets in a family can be represented using a small number of representing elements. Zerbib’s research has numerous applications in computer science, data analysis, biology, economics, and social sciences.

The Scott Hanna Faculty Fellowship was created after Scott Hanna (’77 metallurgy) bequeathed a generous donation to the Department of Mathematics. The award recognizes outstanding math faculty who demonstrate excellence in teaching, research, and service, in addition to making meaningful contributions to the field of mathematics.

Photos by Keo Pierron/Iowa State University