College of Arts & Sciences Announces 2018 Faculty Awards

The College of Arts and Sciences is proud to announce the recipients of the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Awards. These awards recognize faculty members who have contributed to the advancement of the College through their teaching, research or service.

This year’s winners are:

Outstanding Senior Faculty Award: Misty Bentz, associate professor of physics & astronomy. Bentz is an expert on active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which are super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. She is a world expert in improving measurements of these AGNs by correcting for extra light coming from their host galaxies. Bentz served on NASA’s 2014 Astrophysics Roadmap task force, setting out a 30-year vision for space astrophysics for the agency. She is one of only 13 scientists to be granted early access to the James Webb Space Telescope, the $8 billion NASA infrared telescope that will be launched in early 2019. At Georgia State, Bentz founded the AGN lunch symposium and the Women in Physics luncheon.

Outstanding Junior Faculty Award: Maria Repnikova, assistant professor of communication. Repnikova’s research focuses on political communication in illiberal political contexts, with a regional focus on China. Her 2017 book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism, was so well received that she was invited to speak about her research at every Ivy League school, and at Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics in the U.K. She also authored four journal articles last year and serves as the director for the Center for Global Information Studies. She is currently in Ethiopia researching her next project on China’s global image and authoritarianism.

Outstanding Teaching Award: Mindy Stombler, principal senior lecturer of sociology. Stombler developed a two-semester teacher training program for graduate students that has been commended by the American Sociological Association (ASA). She co-authored one of the most widely-used textbooks in sexuality studies, titled Sex Matters: the Sexuality and Society Reader. Last year, she co-authored a second textbook, Focus on Social Problems: A Contemporary Reader, which is already under contract for a second edition. She has received awards including the Carla Howery Award for Developing Teacher-Scholars from the ASA, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Southern Sociological Society, and the Graduate Pedagogical Mentorship Award from the Georgia State University Center for Teaching and Learning.

Outstanding Faculty Diversity Award: Maria Bermudez, senior lecturer, world languages & cultures. Bermudez serves as faculty adviser to the Freshman Learning Community for international students and foreign language learners. She is the founding faculty advisor for Sigma Lambda Upsilon/Senoritas Latinas Unidas, and was selected as Advisor of the Year in the university’s 2017 Greek Awards. She serves as a faculty mentor through the Multicultural Center, and is a longstanding faculty advisor for Goizueta Scholars candidates.

Outstanding Undergraduate Director Award: Jessica Parilla, senior lecturer in biology. Parilla oversees 2300 majors, the largest cohort of undergraduates in the college. She also does all of the course scheduling for the undergraduate and graduate courses. Parilla chaired a committee that reviewed and revised the curriculum of the School of Biology. She also worked with the Honors College to create the first-ever thesis guidelines for biology majors, and created the first Biology Careers Fair, held in May of this year. Finally, Parilla is working with other faculty to develop a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience.

Outstanding Graduate Director Award: Richard Laub, senior lecturer in history and director of the Heritage Preservation Program. Laub became director of heritage preservation in 1999, and has doubled the number of students in the program. In the past five years, he has doubled the amount of external funding for students in his program through working with local nonprofits and agencies to sponsor specific projects. Since 2019, he has brought in funding to support more than 150 student internships. Laub and his students have completed many historic preservation projects in Atlanta – most recently, a preservation plan for downtown Tucker, Ga., and a Historic Structure Report of the Carriage House at Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery.

Outstanding Undergraduate Mentoring Award: Todd Henry, Distinguished University Professor of physics & astronomy. Henry is known for recruiting students to the major, and for giving them unusual opportunities to build their skills. His students learn the latest astronomical software, analyze their own unique datasets – many even travel to northern Chile to work in an observatory there. In 2016, Andrew Sevrinsky, one of Henry’s students, received the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, one of the most prestigious and competitive research scholarships for undergraduates.

Outstanding Graduate Mentoring Award: Erin B. Tone, associate professor of psychology. Tone’s skills can perhaps be seen best through the success of her students , who have presented more than 25 first-authored papers and posters at conferences since 2014. A former student of Tone’s received an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship after graduating, and two of her current students have received highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship awards. Her lab has absorbed eight graduate students whose initial labs turned out to be a bad fit for them. She has also completed facilitator training through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s “Entering Mentoring” program.

Outstanding Career Award: Andrew Altman, Distinguished University Professor of philosophy. Altman’s scholarship centers on the intersection between legal and political philosophy. He has published three monographs and a popular textbook, Arguing About Law, as well as 27 refereed journal articles and nine book chapters. He won four summer seminar grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Altman is currently the research director for the Jean S. Blumenfeld Center for Ethics, and has also served on the college’s executive committee. Most notably, he embraced the challenge of rebuilding the Philosophy department after retirement and resignations reduced its faculty to only three members. The strength of the department today is directly attributable to his work.