People Going Places . . .

College of Architecture and Planning

Gene Bressler is CELA Outstanding Administrator: When the Landscape Architecture faculty was due to evaluate their chair, they not only unanimously endorsed Gene Bressler, they also took it a step further. They nominated him for the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture 2006 Outstanding Administrator Award. He was selected by the CELA jury. The award will be announced at the annual CELA Conference at the University of British Columbia in June. Criteria for the award include outstanding administrative accomplishments or excellence in academic administration, evidence of efforts to instigate, support, or inspire improvements in the education and experience of students, the academic growth and productivity of program faculty, and the positive recognition of the academic unit by outside institutions. CELA is the premier international organization for academics in landscape architecture.

Michael Hughes and Kat Vlahos, assistant professors of architecture, received two of the four ACSA Collaborative Practice Awards given nationally by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to honor the best practices in school-based community outreach programs.

Hughes was recognized for his work with graduate students in creating tectonic gardens and a courtyard for the Joy House Shelter for Victims of Domestic Violence in downtown Denver. The students were immersed in the complexities of a real project, from the initial conceptual stage through construction details and finally to the full-scale construction. The participating students learned various construction methods and developed relationships with the building trades to augment their professional design education. The final design extends the limited interior public space within the apartment complex, creating a much-needed social space for the shelter's adult residents and a protected play area for their children.

Vlahos was honored for her work in ranching documentation, preservation, and interpretation. In the West, there is great concern over our patterns of landscape modification, urban sprawl, and the loss of our cultural resources. This concern especially applies to a particular settlement form of the American West: the traditional ranch. As the cultural landscapes of ranching are altered, ranches change ownership and the ranching culture evolves – and in many cases disappears. The motivation to document, preserve, and understand the evolution of historic ranch sites, as well as to deter the imminent threat to the traditional ranching “working landscape,” prompted a collaborative effort among the university, architecture graduate students, and groups who own ranches throughout the state and are interested in the preservation of their agricultural lands.

Hughes and Vlahos received their awards at the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Salt Lake City on March 31.

College of Engineering and Applied Science

The College of Engineering and Applied Science announced the following college faculty awards:

Excellence in Teaching: Anu Ramaswami. Ramaswami’s achievements as an educator include winning a Department of Education Scholarship grant; creating a new student activities group that won first place in a national EPA competition; teaching a new, multidisciplinary course on infrastructure challenges in Colorado, and overseeing an on-going, international project where students live in India, teaching villagers practical engineering skills to improve their quality of life. See http://carbon.cudenver.edu/engineering/places/.

Excellence in Research: Min Choi. Choi’s research accomplishments include receiving a National Science Foundation Career Award, establishing a research laboratory for computer graphics, and collaborating with faculty both on this campus and at the medical school. See http://graphics.cudenver.edu/project.htm.

Excellence in Service: Kevin Rens. Rens gives excellent services to the Civil Engineering Department, the College of Engineering, and the downtown Denver campus. Kevin also serves as national Chair of the ASCE Technical Council on Forensic Engineering and as an editor for conferences and the editorial board of the TCFE Journal. Kevin also employs a large number of graduate and undergraduate students who work for his research project through the City and County of Denver. See http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~krens/ccd_researches.htm.

School of Education and Human Development

Mike Marlow has returned from the National Science Teacher Association conference to which he took 31 new teachers, experienced teachers, and UCDHSC faculty from the SEHD and CLAS. Mixed teams of new and experienced teachers and university faculty put on five workshops over the course of the conference. Their audiences ranged from 25-70 participants. The overall goal was to mentor new teachers into the science education profession so that teachers would beat the odds of the national drop out rate for science teachers, which is more than 30 percent in the first three years of teaching. Discovery (e.g. Discovery Channel) was impressed and talked with Marlow about partnering with them on future initiatives.

"Early Exit," a series of articles on high school dropout in Denver Public Schools that ran for a week in the Rocky Mountain News in May 2005, won Best Series from the Education Writers Association in the Large Newspapers category. Alan Davis did the data analysis for the series.