Two From SU Earn USM Board of Regents' Faculty Awards for Excellence
SALISBURY, MD---Two Salisbury University professors have earned the University System of Maryland’s highest faculty accolade: the Regents’ Award for Excellence. Dr. Arthur Lembo of the Geography and Geosciences Department was honored for teaching. Dr. Loren Marquez of the English Department was lauded for mentoring.
Lembo is the technical director of SU’s Eastern Shore Regional Geographic Information Science (GIS) Cooperative (ESRGC).
“Salisbury University’s strong reputation is built upon the outstanding teaching and active-learning experiences we provide to our students,” said SU President Janet Dudley-Eshbach. “Dr. Lembo’s contributions exemplify this focus and are documented in the outstanding student outcomes he achieves in the classroom, and through his mentorship of graduate and undergraduate students studying geographic information science.”
“Dr. Lembo’s ability to connect with his students is extraordinary,” said Dr. Michael Scott, interim dean of SU’s Richard A. Henson School of Science and Technology. “His ability to take mathematical and technical concepts and break them down so that students can understand is outstanding, but Dr. Lembo’s excellent skill as a teacher is more than the nuts and bolts of instruction. What sets him apart from his peers is his deep empathy for his students and his constant modeling of professional academic practices that his students pick up on and emulate.”
These include one-on-one teaching for student research projects, mentoring of junior faculty and scholarship that has resulted in his publication of “what most geographers consider the most accessible and pedagogically-sound English-language textbooks on spatial analysis,” Scott said. In addition, Lembo also has provided services throughout Maryland and beyond while training the GIS leaders of tomorrow through the ESRGC.
Lembo earned his Ph.D. in environmental resource engineering from the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He came to SU in 2007 from Cornell University, where he won the New York State Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Marquez is director of SU’s First-Year Writing Program and supervisor of English graduate teaching assistants.
“Few faculty have the opportunity to impact as many students, and future teachers of writing, as does Dr. Marquez,” said SU President Janet Dudley-Eshbach. “Her knowledge, professionalism, care and focus on student success have positively impacted the scores of students she directly interacts with, as well as the many more that her students of English instruction teach. Thus, not only is Dr. Marquez an exceptional mentor; she is an outstanding role model of mentorship.”
Dr. Maarten Pereboom, dean of SU’s Charles R. and Martha N. Fulton School of Liberal Arts, praised Marquez’ development of the school’s required composition course, through which students produce some 50 pages of writing each semester.
“This is the only course we offer that has a significant number of teaching assistants leading sections, and we would not do it if we did not have such an outstanding mentor-teacher as Dr. Marquez guiding their efforts,” he said. “The vibrancy of our rhetoric and composition programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels is due in no small measure to her teaching and mentoring excellence.”
Many of her former students, including Dr. Melissa Bugdal, director of SU’s Writing Center, have been accepted in doctoral programs, he added. Others have won prestigious honors such as a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English abroad. Marquez also has worked with distance learning students in Germany through SU’s partnership with the University of Maryland University College, allowing them to complete Salisbury’s English – Secondary Education Program.
Marquez earned her Ph.D. in English, rhetoric and composition from Texas Christian University before coming to SU in 2007.
For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.