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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Michelle Gordon, 912.961.3173

 

 

AASU Releases Annual Publication on
"Excellence in Research and Scholarship"


Savannah, GA—February 28, 2005—Armstrong Atlantic State University has published its annual report on "Excellence in Research and Scholarship," showcasing the compelling research and scholarship produced by its faculty and students during the 2003-04 academic year. The report features the work faculty and students in the categories of publications, presentations, and other scholarly activity; external funding for the calendar year 2000; internal faculty grants; graduate student theses; and student exhibition.

The annual report is published by the Armstrong Atlantic Research and Scholarship Committee, which solicits research proposals throughout the academic year from faculty and students in the colleges of arts and sciences, education, and health professions, and the schools of computing and graduate studies.

The following eight faculty were profiled in this year's annual report as representative of their peers and in recognition of the outstanding quality of their research and scholarship:

 

Beth Childress, assistant professor of special education, has worked as the coordinator of the reading portion of AASU's Regents' program, helping to reshape the way AASU enforces the rules that have brought both higher compliance rates and test scores. Since the inception of her first online course, Childress has become fascinated with harnessing the power of technology in the classroom. She uses technology to meet the specific purposes of all her courses that, with the exception on one, are taught fully online.

 

George Davies, professor of physical therapy, is driven to find answers that he can apply to his teaching and clinical practice. Last year, the Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy (JOSPT) created a prestigious new international award to recognize excellence in clinical inquiry. The George J. Davies and James A. Gould Excellence in Clinical Inquiry Award will be presented annually to the outstanding paper published in JOSPT in the previous year. Davies has published over a hundred articles and abstracts in refereed journals, 30 book chapters, and written or edited 10 textbooks. After 30 years in the profession, he completed the Doctor of Physical Therapy degree.

 

Jacquie Fraser, associate professor of health sciences, has had success as a natural outflow of her passion for planning programs that will benefit community health. She feels it is important that practitioners not impose their ideas on organizations, but facilitate new ideas that are embraced by the leaders of the organizations. Fraser was instrumental in starting the online public health degree. In 1997, Union Mission asked Fraser to join its clinical oversight board starting. Additionally, she is a member of Partners for Community Health.

 

Ray Hashemi, professor of computing, teaches a variety of courses including data and web mining, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. One of Hashemi's recent projects is a program for the National Center of Toxicological Research, part of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Earlier this year, he completed two projects for an international company, Acxiom. Hashemi created a web-mining language, ALEXIS (a language for excavation of information sources), and a system that can crawl into the Internet to identify the sites containing hate and terrorist messages that was submitted to the Department of Homeland Security.

 

Steve Jodis, assistant dean of the School of Computing, has worked with his faculty on writing successful National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and authoring or co-authoring scholarly papers. He has accomplished a great deal by providing significant support to a variety of pursuits such as furthering ubiquitous handheld computing, developing a paper on differentiating between program languages that appear identical—but are not—and recently, preparing an ethics module for a NSF grant proposal for building an aerial reconnaisance network. Jodis has completed eight chapters of a text on prepaering students to write successful computer programs.

 

Jill Miller, assistant professor of art and director of the Honors Program, has traveled through 23 countries and is AASU's first fulltime art historian. She has seen about a third of the canonical images she lectures on. Miller's research focus is the investigation of gender and architecture. Her findings have been presented at several conferences and she is now working on a paper for publication. This year, Miller succeeded Mark Finley as director of the Honors Program. In this role, her goal is to expand the service component of the program and to consider several across-the-curriculum studies.

 

Daniel Skidmore-Hess, associate professor of political history, has focused his research in the area of U.S. foreign policy and world globalization. He explained that politics are typified by the conflict of economic interests. More importantly, within class conflict there are conflicts within each of the classes. He harbors the idea that one should look at the process of globalization from the perspective of business conflict. In 1999, with Ron Cox of Florida International University, he published a book on this theme, U.S. Politics, and the Global Economy. Currently, he is studying how globalization is working outside the U.S., with a focus on Denmark, Great Britain, and Botswana.

 

Thomas Worley, associate professor of middle, secondary, and adult education, has 31 years of teaching experience in public education. Worley spent the first 16 years teaching in high school. He later served as an assistant junior high principal, then principal. He later completed a doctorate in educational administration at Oklahoma State University and went on to pursue a career in higher education. Worley became involved in distance education that involved weekly visits to his students in the Brunswick area. Later, he wrote his first textbook, Affective Educational Programs. This was soon followed by Social Studies Instruction: A Practitioner's Guide. He is currently working on his third text on effective classroom instruction.