Ron Mitchelson, interim vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, was appointed interim provost to take over for Marilyn Sheerer, who is stepping down in August. A geographer, Mitchelson has been at ECU since 1999. He chaired the Department of Geography and served as interim chair of the English department. In 2011 he was appointed to chair ECU’s Program Prioritization Committee, which evaluated programs campuswide and examined the university’s academic structure. As interim provost, Mitchelson will serve as ECU’s chief academic officer with oversight of academic programming, enrollment management, institutional planning and research, and equity and diversity. William M. Downs, associate dean for social and behavioral sciences at Georgia State University, was named dean of the ECU College of Arts and Sciences. He will begin his position July 1. Downs also received a tenured appointment in the Department of Political Science. He takes over from interim dean John Sutherland, who will return to the Department of Physics as chair. Downs received his doctorate from Emory University in 1994. Abbie Brown, a distanceeducation professor of instructional technology in the ECU College of Education, received the UNC Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence. Brown
teaches exclusively online; he is the first online-only professor at ECU to receive the award and possibly the first such recipient in the UNC system. Brown’s expertise is in the field of instructional design/technology. Many of his courses focus on teaching the teachers of distance-education programs. Matthew Whited, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, was selected to attend a summer institute to receive advanced training in designing and conducting randomized clinical trials involving behavioral interventions. The institute is sponsored by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The 10-day training course will take place at the Arlie Conference Center in Virginia. Bobby Lowery, assistant professor and director of the ECU College of Nursing’s doctor of nursing practice program, was selected as a 2014 fellow of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Lowery will be inducted on June 19 during the AANP 29th National Conference in Nashville, Tenn. Patrick Carr, assistant director for acquisitions and collection management at Joyner Library, was honored with the 2014 Esther J. Piercy Award by the Association for Library Collections & Technical
Services. The award will be presented June 28 at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2014 American Library Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas. Jonathan Sorensen, a criminal justice professor, will oversee the Capital Jury Project archive in the ECU Department of Criminal Justice. The data archive includes interviews from about 1,200 death penalty jurors in 14 states. Results from the study have enabled researchers to publish more than 60 academic and law journal articles over the last 22 years. The archive was originally funded by the National Science Foundation. Sorensen, who joined the ECU faculty in 2012, has achieved national prominence as an expert on capital punishment and prediction of criminal offender dangerousness. Lalage Katunga, a doctoral student in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Brody School of Medicine at ECU, is the recipient of a Graduate Student Travel Award from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. The award will pay for her trip to present research at the 17th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology in Cape Town, South Africa, from July 13-18. Katunga joined the laboratory of Ethan Anderson, assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology, in 2011. Her primary interest is in nutrition and metabolism. She is originally from Harare, Zimbabwe.
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