This article is from the archives of the UB Reporter.
News

Five honored with Plesur award

  • Sarah Elder

  • James Jensen

  • Peter Morgan

  • Bradley Owens

  • David Watson

By SUE WUETCHER
Published: May 31, 2012

Five faculty members have received Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Awards from the undergraduate Student Association for their commitment to students and the quality of their teaching.

The coveted award is named for Plesur, a professor in the Department of History who died in 1987. He was a beloved teacher, author and scholar of popular culture and the American presidency, whose humor captivated his students.

The recipients of the 2012 Plesur awards are:

  • Sarah Elder, professor, Department of Media Study, and adjunct professor of anthropology.

Elder is an award-winning documentary film director whose work focuses on the practices of filming across cultural and social boundaries. She is known in particular for her 25 years of documentary work among Alaskan Eskimos and other indigenous Arctic peoples.

Her films have won three consecutive first prizes at the American Film Festival, three first-prize Bronze Eagles at the Santa Fe Native Americas International Exposition, a third prize from the IX International Festival of Ethnographic Films (Italy) and three USA Golden Eagles, among others.

A UB faculty member since 1989, Elder teaches courses in non-fiction critical studies, documentary production, experimental documentary, theory and practice of editing, ethnographic film and video, media ethics and story-telling. She is a recipient of Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

  • James Jensen, professor, Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering.

An environmental engineer and UB faculty member since 1988, Jensen serves as director of undergraduate studies and director of the MS program in environmental science. He also is academic director for the Research Exploration Academy in the Undergraduate Academies.

His research and teaching responsibilities focus on drinking water and wastewater treatment processes. He has directed recent undergraduate research projects on sustainable drinking water treatment practices in Africa, biodiesel production and the fate of personal care products in the environment.

Jensen was director of the Center for Teaching and Learning from 2003-04, and received the 1995 Chancellor‘s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Engineering Educator of the Year award in 2009 from the Erie-Niagara Chapter of the New York State Society of Professional Engineers.

  • Peter Morgan, associate professor, Department of Economics.

A UB faculty member since 1989, Morgan serves as director of undergraduate studies in the economics department.

His research interests include the economics of information, with emphasis on non-cooperative matching theory; model selection involving the sequential acquisition of information; and experimental examination of microeconomic theory.

For many semesters Morgan has taught “Economics 182,” an introduction to microeconomics course, using a specially prepared “lecture notebook” that contains most of the notes a student likely would take during lectures, along with diagrams. The intention, he says, is to give students time to think and participate in the lectures, rather than busily taking notes.

  • Bradley Owens, assistant professor of organization and human resources, School of Management.

Owens, who joined the School of Management faculty in fall 2011, teaches “Organizational Behavior and Administration.”

A member of the Academy of Management, his academic interests include leadership, team processes, race and gender issues, and work/life balance.

His research on how racial and gender biases influence customer satisfaction received the Academy of Management Best Paper Award for 2011.

  • David F. Watson, associate professor of chemistry.

A UB faculty member since 2004, Watson teaches general chemistry, a course taken by large numbers of undergraduates.

His research interests involve materials synthesis, surface chemistry, photochemistry and spectroscopy. Work in his lab involves the synthesis, characterization and self-assembly of inorganic nanomaterials and fundamental studies of photoinduced electron transfer process at interfaces.

He has received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a James D. Watson Investigator Award from the New York State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research (NYSTAR).