UC Davis will honor three of its non-tenured faculty members for their teaching and research this month as part of the campus’s ongoing recognition of academic achievements.
The reception for the 2000 winners of the Academic Federation Award for Excellence in Teaching and for the newly instituted Award for Excellence in Research will be 5-7 p.m. Dec. 13 at the University Club.
The Academic Federation is an organization of about 850 non-tenured faculty members who include lecturers, researchers, librarians, clinical and adjunct professors, and Cooperative Extension specialists, among others.
The first winner of the federation’s Excellence in Research Award is Marilyn Olmstead, an academic specialist in the Department of Chemistry. Two lecturers, Donna Nincic of the Department of Political Science and Michael Guinan of both the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Division of Biological Sciences won the teaching award.
Marilyn Olmstead
Olmstead was recognized for her outstanding accomplishments in recent research, her warmth and skill as a mentor, and her success in motivating students.
A recent survey of the chemical literature indicated that Olmstead’s contributions have been cited 4,889 times, making her the 175th most cited chemist in the world and the single most cited American woman chemist. She is one of the foremost authorities in the world on structures containing fullerenes, also known as buckyballs, which are particularly difficult to characterize.
In letters supporting her nomination for the award, Olmstead was praised by a UC Santa Cruz faculty member for running the most efficient and effective X-ray facility in the country. Arnold L. Rheingold, a chemistry professor at the University of Delaware, said Olmstead is "an heroic crystallographer … one who will do whatever is necessary to extract structural information from a crystal, and some days of the week this is not too different from encountering at one time all the great plagues of the Earth."
Olmstead came to Davis in 1969 after receiving her doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
She has received a number of other awards at UC Davis, including the Administrative and Professional Staff Achievement Award and five Professional Development Awards. She has served on the board of editors of the journal Inorganic Chemistry and was recently appointed co-editor of a new journal, Acta Crystallographica Section E.
Michael Guinan
Guinan’s students say their instructor’s command of the subject of comparative anatomy is "phenomenal" and his love of teaching is "refreshing."
Guinan is a lecturer in both the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Division of Biological Sciences. He has taught at all levels, ranging from elementary human physiology to advanced comparative anatomy to first-year veterinary medicine courses.
In addition to teaching, he recruits and actively mentors 20 senior undergraduate students to serve as discussion leaders in his human physiology classes.
Students praised Guinan for his organization, preparation, clarity, energy and ability to make science interesting. They noted that he encourages student participation and creates a comfortable, non-intimidating learning environment.
He received special praise from students for a new interactive computer program he introduced for laboratory material in an upper-division course that compares the organs of various vertebrate animals. Students can access the program from the Web and work through the material at their own pace.
Donna Nincic
Political science’s Nincic was a lecturer at UC Davis from 1991-1994 and returned to the campus during the 1998-1999 academic year. In the intervening two years, she taught at George Washington University and was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Described by her department as "one of the most talented instructors we have had," she is particularly recognized for the care and thoroughness with which her lectures are prepared.
She has developed a course on "Ocean Politics" for the International Relations Program – one of the few courses on campus that teaches environmental issues from a social science perspective and that does not have extensive prerequisites. Her knack for telling a story and conveying difficult conceptual issues to students without extensive background has been marked.
Her students describe her as "everything that a professor should be: intelligent, clear, and friendly," with the ability to inspire her students to learn and work hard.
She is able to develop a rapport with an entire class very quickly. She is particularly noted for her talent for taking a students’ own inchoate ideas and helping the student focus them into a research assignment that is both innovative and original.