Carole Hom stands on her tiptoes and reaches with the chalk as high as she can, about 8 inches from the top of the blackboard in a Storer Hall classroom.

She writes quickly and neatly, putting down the key points of the Biology 132 lecture that she is delivering early one morning in December, the last day of the fall quarter.

She works across three sections of blackboard, then returns to the first, erases it, and starts writing more lecture highlights.

Hom, an academic coordinator in Ecology and Evolution, would need a lot more chalk and a lot more blackboard space to write down a different batch of highlights, her career highlights — the ones that the UC Davis Academic Federation recognized recently when it presented her with the James H. Meyer Distinguished Achievement Award for 2005.

"It hardly seems fair to recognize me for something that I have so much fun doing," said Hom, who has been at UC Davis for 20 years. The fun, she said, is "teaching and mentoring bright students, (and) doing creative work with faculty and students."

The 34-year-old Meyer award — its namesake served as chancellor from 1969 to 1987 — is earmarked for Academic Federation members. They are the campus's nearly 1,200 lecturers, librarians, agronomists, project scientists, professional researchers, academic administrators and academic coordinators.

With her appointment in a section of the College of Biological Sciences, Hom helps coordinate the Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship, or IGERT, in biological invasions.

Take smooth cordgrass, for example, which she said has invaded acres of wetlands on the West Coast. The plant hybridizes with native cordgrasses and forms dense meadows that smother native vegetation, clog channels, impede tidal flow and reduce suitable habitat for wildlife.

Hom attacks such problems by crunching the numbers. "If you build a model of what it is you observe, you might gain insight into how it functions — insight that you might not get from a lab or field experiment."

Partly due to her efforts, this quantitative approach is showing up more and more in the biological sciences curriculum — like the Biology 132 class that she teaches annually. "It's about using math or computer modeling to answer questions in biology," she said.

Martin Wilson, a professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior, joined Richard Grosberg, professor of evolution and ecology, in nominating Hom for the Meyer award. "She combines two disciplines in a way that very few people do," Wilson said.

He described Hom as "an extraordinary teacher," "a terrific mentor of students and even faculty," and "remarkable in her outreach to minorities and women."

He commended her administrative skills and said she is well respected by faculty: "She can smooth ruffled feathers and get people working in the same direction."

Hom's interest in math education is not limited to college. Each summer since 1998, she has taught a School of Education course for students aiming for careers teaching students in kindergarten through sixth grades.

"It's about math and why it works the way it does," she said.

Hom said she tries to take the mystery out of math, "to make it less scary." If grade school teachers understand it better, she said, they can teach it better.

She began her career at UC Davis as a visiting professor in the mathematics department in 1986-87, and she was a lecturer in math from 1989 to 1998. She was named Outstanding Teacher of Lower Division Mathematics in 1991 and received the Academic Federation's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994.

In accepting the Meyer award, Hom acknowledged "a gazillion calculus students who taught me how to be a teacher."

Kendrick Barnes, one of the gazillion, said few people, if any, teach better than Hom.

Barnes, a program coordinator in the campus's Internship and Career Center, recalled his time as a student in Hom's Math 16A and 16B calculus lectures. Even with 200 to 300 students, Barnes said, "she noticed if you, individually, were not getting it." If she sensed you needed help, she would invite you to meet with her after class.

Lauren Lui said she met Hom when inquiring about adding quantitative biology as a minor to Lui's math major. Lui took Biology 132 last quarter. "(Hom) was always really enthusiastic in class — and that always makes the class better," Lui said.

In her office upstairs in Storer Hall a few days after her last lecture of the quarter, Hom said she fills the blackboard with comments as well as computations because students are apt to write down what the teacher writes down.

But there is another reason: Some students may prefer her smooth writing to the stutter that frequently freezes her words for seconds. "It helps" to see her words on the chalkboard, she acknowledged, and it is "a way of addressing different learning styles."

It also is another way that she "focuses on each and every student," Barnes said.

He described Hom as "a great role model" because she never let her stuttering get in her way. "I can't imagine the courage it takes to come to a university of this size and teach," he said, "and the talent that it took to succeed here."

Hom mostly shrugs off her stutter. "The students whom it bothers don't take my classes," she said. For other students, "if it works for them, it works for me."

That is how she approached her career as a teacher with a speech impediment: "I just took it one step at a time."

Twenty years — and thousands of steps later — at UC Davis, she is still lecturing and mentoring. "I wouldn't have persevered if I didn't enjoy it as much as I do," she said.