Kim McCullough, Barbara Clancy and Allison Vetter won the 2008 UCA faculty awards announced last week.McCullough, of UCA’s Department of Speech-Language Pathology, won the Teaching Excellence Award. Since she arrived at UCA in 2001, her profound impact on her students has been witnessed through their effusive praise of her ability to bridge the academic and clinical and through her adept teaching of how to assist effectively their own patients. Her students express consistently their admiration for Dr. McCullough’s empathetic regard for the patients whom she serves with dedication. In fact, Dr. McCullough is described time and again as “a model for sensitivity towards patients,” a characteristic her students seek to cultivate and emulate. One student’s comments reflect nicely the sentiments of many other similar evaluations: “She cares about her students, challenges them to excel, conveys knowledge in an interesting way, and is an expert in her field.” Dr. McCullough has been able to impact not only her community of students but the community at large through her pedagogical mastery of and passion for her field of study.
Clancy, an assistant professor in UCA’s Department of Biology, won the Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Award. She teaches Neuroscience and Biology, and previously she was a Post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University, working on the hypothesis that dissimilar areas of developing brains follow common connectivity ‘rules’. While there, she adapted evolutionary-based statistical modeling to allow research done in laboratory animals to be correlated to the study of the developing human brain. She was also a Rett Foundation Fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she began to study the function of persisting subplate cells in the white matter of the cortex. Dr. Clancy has continued these studies at UCA, where she has mentored over 30 UCA students some of which have presented at International and National conferences, and are co-authors on peer reviewed publications. One of these articles reports the establishment of a modeling web site where brain developmental time can be translated across mammalian species. This site has been used over 13,000 times in the past two years by clinicians and researchers at universities, medical centers and hospitals in over 40 different states and 40 different countries. Dr. Clancy has mentored six Honors College theses, two of which won outstanding thesis awards. Her students have won SURF awards, prestigious Rotary and Goldwater scholarships, gained acceptance to graduate schools including UAMS, and gone on to technical research positions at UAMS, Arkansas Children
