Honors College Celebrates Outstanding Faculty 

The Honors College will recognize six faculty members at the annual Honors College Faculty Reception from 5:30-7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 6, in the Fowler House Conservatory. This year, awards are offered in the Distinguished Leadership and Distinguished Research and Teaching Faculty Award categories.  

“Our 2023 Honors College Faculty Award winners have excelled in mentoring complex undergraduate research, international education, leadership and service,” said Honors College Dean Lynda Coon. “They hail from multiple colleges and disciplines. Together, this cohort has transformed the academic world of the university’s top scholars. Join me in celebrating them on November 6!”  

Dean Coon will present a bronze medallion to the award winners, who will be introduced by the deans of their respective colleges. Each winner also will receive $1,000 in academic funding and will be listed on the Faculty Awards page of the Honors College website.  

DISTINGUISHED LEADERSHIP AWARD  

Lindsey S. Aloia, associate dean in the Graduate School and International Education, associate professor in the Department of Communication. Since joining the University of Arkansas in 2015, Aloia collaborated with the Honors College as a thesis director, a department-level director, and the director of the Honors Studies Program in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. More specifically, Aloia served as a thesis director for four undergraduate honors theses. Three of her undergraduate honors students were awarded Student Undergraduate Research Fellowships from the Arkansas Department of Higher Education, three students presented their work at national conferences, and two students published their work in peer-reviewed journals.   

In addition to her role as a thesis director, Aloia served as the department-level director for the Department of Communication. Aloia recruited talented communication students to the Honors College, facilitated the thesis conceptualization course annually, and assisted during summer orientation programs. Finally, Aloia served as the director of the Honors Studies Program in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. As the director, Aloia primarily sought to improve the honors experience for students through monthly meetings to encourage students’ progress related to the rigorous curriculum, book clubs for each academic level facilitated by a faculty member to build community, peer mentorships to offer support, and honors specific advising to provide specialized consultation. In each role, Aloia demonstrated her unending commitment to the Honors College’s mission to build a transformative community of students prepared to excel professionally, flourish personally and lead globally.       

DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH AND TEACHING FACULTY AWARD  

Hope A. Ballentine, teaching associate professor and curriculum coordinator, Eleanor Mann School of Nursing. Ballentine also serves as co-director of the Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center.

Ballentine has served as a formal mentor for 38 Honors Students (24 as chair, 14 as committee member) since 2019. She finds it rewarding to work one-on-one with students while helping them develop an Honors project or thesis that reflects their personal passions. In addition, she enjoys developing personal relationships with students and watching them transform into professionals while serving as a reference, source for interview practice, resume reviewer and celebrator of their future accomplishments. Ballentine finds it rewarding to see students get the “internship of a lifetime” or admitted to the graduate school of their dreams after watching them work so hard to make it happen.

As the coordinator of Honors students at EMSON, Ballentine serves as a resource for students seeking a mentor and committee member and complete the required forms for thesis proposal and approval. She works with students and faculty mentors to make sure faculty mentors have what they need to effectively mentor students. Ballentine has also enjoyed leading the effort to make sure expectations for Honors students in our department are streamlined and consistent through the creation of departmental syllabi and rubrics for Honors projects and theses. 

Rogelio Garcia Contreras, teaching assistant faculty in the Department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Venture Innovation, Sam M. Walton College of Business. Outside Academia, Garcia Contreras has extensive experience, working as a consultant, researcher, and a political and public policy analyst in both, the private and public sectors of Mexico and the United States. He has collaborated with a variety of foundations, organizations and institutions of higher education in the design and implementation of comprehensive development initiatives in places like Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Haiti, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Turkey, Pakistan and the United States. 

Garcia Contreras is always honored and excited by the opportunity to lead honors classes. He believes each one of the honors courses he conducts ends up having lots of elements that make them unique, namely: freedom in the selection of the topic; substantial preparation for the class, and, above all, the superb quality of students. To Garcia Conteras, honors students’ commitment to the class, and their ability and disposition to foster a collective learning experience for everyone involved makes them special and unique. He notes that as a safe space for the free and equal exchange of ideas, every Honors course he has had the opportunity to lead is one in which the quality of students involved is extraordinary.

Brian Holland, assistant professor, architecture, Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Holland coordinates the architecture department’s third-year core housing design studio, for which he was awarded an AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award in 2022. In addition to design, he also teaches courses on urban theory, social and environmental advocacy in the design disciplines, and research methods for architects, landscape architects, and interior designers. Holland has coordinated the Fay Jones School’s public lecture series since 2018 and has served with University Housing as faculty-in-residence since 2019. With his research and creative practice, Holland explores alternative frameworks for conceptualizing the architect’s agency in society, while also seeking to expand the discipline’s repertoire of theories, tactics, and strategies for working on the world in a relevant and impactful way. 

For four of the past five years, Holland has co-taught the Honors Methods of Design Inquiry course in the Fay Jones School. In that course, he works with interior design and landscape architecture faculty to help shepherd students through the process of developing a prospectus for their honors capstone inquiries. As an extension of this work, he has served as a committee member on nearly a dozen capstone projects, including investigations of the social dynamics of cohousing communities (Kayla Ho, 2022 winner of the ARCC King Student Medal for Excellence in Architectural + Environmental Design Research); neighborhood identity in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (Isaí Castañeda, 2022 runner-up for the ARCC King Medal); inclusivity in design practice (Gabe De Souza Silva); and community-engaged design in rural Arkansas (Gracie Musgrove). One of Holland’s advisees—landscape architecture student Max Frank—received national recognition for a peer-reviewed conference paper he co-wrote with Holland based on Frank’s capstone, “Post-Public: Contextualizing the Privatization of Public Space.” Holland has also worked with several honors students on his own ongoing research into “piggybacking practices”—urban-design responses to inequality and resource scarcity in the built environment—efforts that have resulted in a symposium and an exhibition of drawings currently on view at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Han Hu, assistant professor, mechanical engineering, College of Engineering. Han has been directing the Nano Energy and Data-Driven Discovery Laboratory since he joined the University of Arkansas in Fall 2019.  His research covers electronics cooling, spacecraft thermal control, and AI-enabled advanced sensing and signal segmentation. He has mentored 19 Engineering Honors scholars in research projects and business plan competitions. Many students have received prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Goldwater scholarship, Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), DART Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, and ASEE Midwest Section Conference Best Student Paper and Poster Awards (2022, 2023).

Han embraces a student-centered teaching philosophy that prioritizes the needs, interests, and active participation of students in the learning process. For example, his Machine Learning for Mechanical Engineers course has a strong focus on project-based learning and peer assessment to make students take an active role in their education and foster critical thinking, collaboration, and project management skills. In this course, students can study a problem of their interest with support for algorithm/package selection, programming and debugging, and proposal and report writing. Several students have turned their course projects into publications or honors thesis.

Han’s research outcomes and mentorship has been recognized by the thermal fluids and engineering communities. At UofA, he received the Outstanding Mentor Award (2022 – 2023), the Faculty Gold Medal (2023), and the MEEG Outstanding Service to Students Award (2023).

James Michael Lampinen, Distinguished Professor and chair, psychological science, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Lampinen is a cognitive psychologist who does research and teaches classes on the intersection between psychology and the legal system. The courses’ research focuses on eyewitness memory, missing persons, false memories and jury decision making. In the 25 years he has been at the University of Arkansas, Lampinen has found it a pleasure to do much of that research in collaboration with a group of outstanding undergraduate honors thesis students.

Honors students in Lampinen’s lab have been treated, not just as mentees, but as scientific collaborators and lab leaders. They have produced outstanding research that has been presented at regional, national and international scientific conferences. With his honors students, Lampinen has published the research in some of the highest-ranked scientific journals in psychology, and some of their research has even made it into college textbooks. Undergraduate students have even helped him travel the state of Arkansas providing free training to law enforcement. One of the highlights of Lampinen’s career at the University of Arkansas has been having the privilege to work with so many outstanding students.  

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.