Assistant Dean Recognized by Honors College

The Honors College will recognize six faculty members at the annual Honors College Faculty Reception on Tuesday, November 7th.

The awards are in two categories, the Distinguished Faculty Award and the Distinguished Leadership Award.

medal image“Our honors faculty work extremely hard to support our students, putting in many extra hours to mentor research, write letters of recommendation, and prepare them for the next steps beyond the degree,” said Honors College Dean Lynda Coon. “These six have set the bar especially high for teaching, research, mentoring and leadership. We are deeply grateful to them, and look forward to recognizing their contributions next week.”

Dean Coon will present a bronze medallion to this year’s Distinguished Faculty Award and Distinguished Leadership Award recipients, who will be introduced by the deans of their respective colleges. Each winner also will receive $1,000 in academic funding.

Receiving the Distinguished Leadership Award from the College of Engineering, Bryan Hill, assistant dean for student recruitment and diversity, honors and international programs.

Bryan HillHill has more than 15 years of experience in engineering student recruitment, retention, diversity initiatives, and K-12 outreach programs. Since he became assistant dean in 2009, the College of Engineering’s undergraduate enrollment has increased 92 percent, female enrollment has increased 157 percent and minority enrollment 152 percent. Overall honors enrollment in engineering has increased by nearly 50 percent since 2009.

Hill also has served as assistant director of the College of Engineering Honors Program since 2009 and is director of UAteach, a secondary math and science teacher education program. In addition, he was instrumental in starting the Pre-Academic Program for SENACYT Scholars, a five-year program designed to provide low-income, rural Panamanian students a pipeline to college graduation. Hill is principal investigator on STEM educational and outreach grants totaling $6.6 million.

Hill mentored the inaugural interdisciplinary team of students who submitted the first joint honors thesis in the College of Engineering. He has also embarked on an ambitious curriculum mapping plan to provide engineering students an eight-semester degree plan that includes a semester at a partner institution abroad. In the first year of these efforts, the number of engineering students spending a semester abroad has increased fivefold.

In 2015 Hill was recognized as one of the Top 15 Researchers on the U of A campus. He also received the 2017 Collis R. Geren Award for Excellence in Graduate Education and was a finalist for the Global Engineering Deans Council Airbus Diversity Award in 2014.

The full Newswire Story about the Honors College Awards can be found here.

November 2, 2017