Faculty and Staff 2024 Convocation Awards
UW-Parkside is proud to present our 2024 faculty and staff convocation award winners:
- Academic Staff Distinguished Service Award - Amy Garrigan
- University Staff Distinguished Service Award - Lisa Crumble and Jean Hrpcek
- Faculty Distinguished Service Award - Christopher Hudspeth
- Excellence in Advising Award - Brent Sekularac
- Community Engaged Learning and Research Award- Dr. Megan Parietti
- Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award – Robert Barber
- Early Career Excellence in Teaching Award- Jordan Snyder
- Early Career Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award- Ling Li
- Stella C. Gray Teaching Excellence Awards - Cathy Mossman and Laura Schulz
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Supervisor of the Year - David Gehring
*Note: You can find last year's award winners here.
Academic Staff Distinguished Service Award
Amy Garrigan | Community and Business Engagement Program Manager
Amy Garrigan has served in the Alan E. Guskin Center for Community & Business Engagement since 2017. In her role, Garrigan coordinates community-based learning opportunities that connect faculty and students to community organizations in order to deepen student learning and help meet community needs. She has taught CBL 101: Intro to Community Engagement, helped create the Civic Internship Program and advises students completing the Community Engagement Certificate. She is a graduate of Leadership Kenosha, a community leadership program she now co-facilitates in partnership with the Kenosha Area Chamber of Commerce. In 2023, Amy was selected to participate in the American Association of State Colleges & Universities Emerging Leaders Program.
Before coming to UW-Parkside, Garrigan worked for more than eight years in the organizational training and development office at Kenosha Unified School District along with additional roles in higher education and nonprofit organizations. She earned her B.A. in Biology from DePauw University and her master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from University of Washington–Tacoma.
She is passionate about the power of education to transform lives and supports various community education initiatives, including serving as vice president of the Education Foundation of Kenosha. She lives in Pleasant Prairie with her husband and two daughters and enjoys reading, hiking, and traveling.
Congratulations, Amy!
University Staff Distinguished Service Award
Lisa Crumble | Financial/Administrative Specialist
Lisa Crumble is the financial/administrative specialist for the Provost Office and the Center for Excellence in Inclusive Teaching and Learning. Recently, her role expanded to include executive support for the provost and vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, the vice provost for academic affairs, and, briefly, the vice chancellor for finance and administration.
Highly regarded across the university for her courtesy and dedication, Crumble excels in managing a broad and diverse range of responsibilities. She supports the creation and implementation of university policies and processes, meticulously manages numerous budgets, and consistently meets critical deadlines.
In addition, she has overhauled the infrastructure for shared record keeping within the provost's office, enabling the university to access records quickly and accurately. She is known as “the go-to for workflow efficiencies” and gets the job done no matter the difficulty.
When not diligently serving the university, Crumble and her husband are active members of their church and host weekly meetings to guide people to deepen their faith and serve both the church and the broader community. Her grandchildren are her oxygen. She can often be found reliving her childhood with and through them.
Congratulations, Lisa!
University Staff Distinguished Service Award
Jean Hrpcek | Administrative Assistant
Jean Hrpcek is a proud alumna of UW-Parkside and an administrative assistant in the Student Life administration. She has worked at UW-Parkside since 2012. Hrpcek serves the campus community by supporting those who directly support students to ensure they have more time to focus on what is the core of UW-Parkside: our students.
She serves as the administrative assistant to the vice chancellor of student affairs and enrollment services, supports the assistant vice chancellor of enrollment service/director of admissions, supports the Student Affairs & Enrollment Services Departments, supports the UW-Parkside Library, is a member of the University Staff Committee, served on the Chancellor’s Workforce Climate Action Team, and is a member of the Workday/ATP Ambassador Team.
She has been involved in Scouts BSA as a leader since 1994. She began when her oldest son joined Cub Scouts and has moved along with both of her boys through their scouting years. She has earned numerous scouting awards during those years.
She has also served on the board of a non-profit organization since 2017, including the last five years as president. Outside of work, Hrpcek enjoys being outdoors, camping, hiking and geocaching.
Congratulations, Jean!
Faculty Distinguished Service Award
Christopher Hudspeth| Associate Professor, Philosophy
Dr. Christopher Hudspeth is an associate professor of philosophy at UW-Parkside. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in 2009.
His areas of expertise are ethics and moral psychology and his work has been published in multiple publications. He teaches courses ranging from professional ethics to metaphysics.
Hudspeth serves the university in many capacities, including many committees and as a UW System faculty representative.
Congratulations, Christopher!
Excellence in Advising Award
Brent Sekularac | Academic Advisor, College of Business, Economics, and Computing
Brent Sekurlac currently serves as an academic and career advisor for the College of Business, Economics, and Computing at UW-Parkside. The student experience has been at the forefront of Sekurlac’s passion for more than 14 years, as he previously worked at the College of Lake County as a tutor from 2008-2020.
During his time at UW-Parkside, Sekurlac has worked closely with the Computer Science department in developing a co-op with career partners, course scheduling, and boosting enrollment in formerly low-enrolled courses. He also served as the interim graphic design advisor.
Sekurlac uses simple means in his advising to produce effective outcomes. Borrowing from his creative background in filmmaking, he uses notecards as a tool to show his students their four-year plans. This simple technique has led to an increase in declared certificates, minors, and double majors.
In his free time, he enjoys watching pro wrestling, stand-up comedy, and baking homemade bread. To quote the late Patrice O’Neal, “You fill your integrity on your journey to finding your people.” The students at UW-Parkside are his people.
Congratulations, Brent!
Community Engaged Learning and Research Award
Dr. Megan Parietti | Associate Professor of Health Kinesiology and Sport Management
From the time she attended college and engaged in experiential learning herself, Dr. Parietti saw the value of community-based experiences for students. Since 2016, she has been a practitioner and campus leader in both CBL and internships. After attending the first Community Based Learning Faculty workshop, Dr. Parietti formed a partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of Kenosha where her students developed sports programming for underserved youth. Dr. Parietti was appointed to the CBL Steering Committee in 2016 and has served since. In addition, she supervises around 10 internship students each semester. One of her ongoing employer partners commended her regular communication and thorough supervision leading to a valued mutually-beneficial partnership.
Dr. Parietti has helped to create a more cohesive fieldwork experience for sport management students through the creation of a fieldwork sandbox that all faculty supervisors in her department can access. She also initiated the first Sports Career Day in 2022. Dr. Parietti was invited to join the newly-formed campus Internship Steering Committee in 2018, on which she still serves helping to develop assessment strategies for internships. In 2021, she served as Interim Faculty Director of Internships where she advocated for educating students and faculty about how to address sexual harassment in community-based experiences.
Congratulations, Megan!
Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award
Robert Barber | Associate Professor, Art and Design Department
Dr. Robert Barber is currently a professor of Biological Sciences at UW-Parkside. He teaches introductory biology courses as well as advanced courses in protein biochemistry and metabolism. His laboratory’s research uses genetic, biochemical, and informatics strategies to understand short chain, medium chain, and branched chain fatty acid metabolism in Bacteroides; keystone species among the gut microbiotal community that play critical roles in the health of humans and other animals. This work is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health R15GM150186: Enzymology of Bacteroides short and branched chain fatty acid metabolism.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology with Distinction at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Dr. Barber obtained a Ph.D. studying microbial physiology in the Cellular and Molecular Biology program at the UW-Madison. He also earned a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at The Pennsylvania State University to study archaeal biochemistry and physiology.
Congratulations, Robert!
Early Career Excellence in Teaching Award
Jordan Snyder | Assistant Professor, Psychology
Dr. Jordan Snyder is an assistant professor in the Psychology, Professional Counseling, and Neuroscience Department. He has been at UW-Parkside since 2021. He teaches a variety of courses including clinically oriented courses in the undergraduate program.
He encourages students to relate the scholarly material to everyday life and reflect on how learning has shaped them. He directs the Global Community Wellness Lab, where he conducts research with wonderful Parkside students related to mental health and well-being of conflict-affected populations, including how to increase mental health providers' abilities to work with refugees and asylum seekers.
He enjoys getting to see students transform during their years at college through learning and research and then using their acquired expertise to positively impact their communities.
Congratulations, Jordan!
Early Career Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award
Ling Li | Associate Professor, Economics
Dr. Ling Li is an associate professor of economics at the UW-Parkside. She received her Ph.D. in economics in 2018 from Syracuse University and her B.A. in economics in 2013 from Tsinghua University. Her research areas include labor and health economics.
Dr. Li has published research in prestigious journals, including Journal of American Journal of Health Economics, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Review of International Economics and JAMA Health Forum. Her research is supported by several grants from the Institute for Humane Studies and China Health Policy and Management Society.
Dr. Li’s research has received great attention from the policy makers and the media. Her work on the effect of workplace inspections have been cited by a report to the Chief Evaluation Office of the U.S. Department of Labor. Her research on recreational marijuana legalization and workplace injuries among younger workers work has been cited in 27 news stories, including an article from the U.S. News & World Report.
Congratulations, Ling!
Stella C. Gray Teaching Excellence Award
Cathy Mossman | Distinguished Lecturer, Biological Sciences
Dr. Cathy Mossman is a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences and has been at UW-Parkside for more than 25 years. She has taught a variety of courses including introductory biology lectures and labs and an upper-level animal behavior course. She has a passion for student-centered learning which is reflected in all of her courses.
In addition to teaching, Dr. Mossman enjoys being the advisor for the Biology and Hindu Jeevan Clubs and doing biological educational outreach to inspire the next generation of biologists.
Cathy earned her Ph.D. in Ecology from Purdue University, studying the genetic effects of habitat fragmentation in white-footed mice. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time outdoors with her family.
Congratulations, Cathy!
Stella C. Gray Teaching Excellence Award
Laura Schulz | Environmental Education Manager and Environmental Studies Lecturer
Laura Schulz has worked as a lecturer and environmental education manager in the College of Natural and Health Sciences since 2016. She has taught courses in Environmental Studies, Geosciences, Sustainable Management, and Chemistry and is the director of the Root River Environmental Education Community Center (REC) in Racine. She enjoys the wide range of ages she teaches, from college seniors in Environmental Studies Seminar to fourth graders in the Root River Explorers Program at the REC. Schulz especially enjoys teaching her courses outside and aims to leave her students with a passion for protecting the natural world.
Her students can commonly be seen wearing waders, collecting water samples, digging soil pits, or kayaking on the Root River. Schulz is also the assistant project manager for the City of Waukesha’s Post Return Flow Root River Collection Plan and has served on the Girls Empowered by Math and Science (GEMS) Committee for the past six years. A proud UW-Parkside Geoscience alumna, she was the Chancellor’s Award recipient in 2011 and received her Master’s in Soil Science from UW-Madison in 2014. Outside of work, Schulz serves as co-chair for the local Sierra Club and enjoys being the campaign manager for her rabbit’s (Lumpy’s) quest to be the President of the UW-Parkside Paws and Claws Club.
Congratulations, Laura!
Supervisor of the Year
David Gehring | Evening Library Supervisor and Head of Access Services (Retired) | Emeritus
David Gehring is a proud UW-Parkside alumni. He earned a B.A. in Art in 1989 and a B.A. in English Literature in 1990. From 1985-1990 he worked as a student library desk attendant.
After a solo backpacking trip to Europe in 1990, he began working at UW-Parkside. He served as the evening library supervisor for 22 years and the last 11 years as the Head of Access Services in the library before retiring on April 1, 2024.
He has been married to his wife Michelle for 28 years and together they have a son, Mark. Gehring is very grateful for the experience and to have worked with many amazing co-workers and student staff over the decades. He enjoys spending time walking, reading, writing, drawing, and relaxing.
Congratulations, David!