Service Awards Program scheduled for April 23
The Office of Human Resources will hold the 2012 Service Awards Program on Mon., April 23, 12-1:30 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom. The annual program recognizes SPSU employees and those who will be retiring this year for their service and dedication to the university.

Tenure and promotions as well as Outstanding Faculty and Staff awards will also be announced during the event.

Employees receiving service awards and employees retiring or recently retired include:

Five Years of Service – Hussein Abaza, Kami Anderson, Richard Becherer, Susan Bentzen-Gordet, Eric Brumfield, Sylvia Carson, Queenester Covington, Hoyt Dunn, Scott Garland, Angela Goodman, William Griffin Jr., Sharon Hamrick, Mine Hashas-Degertekin, Erhan Ilksoy, Scott Jordan Jr., Sung-Hee Kim, Cynthia Knight, Ann Leo-Trim, Matthew McCool, Pavankumar Meadati, Yolanda Pauley, Willie Pittman, Greg Quinet, Kisa Ranasinghe, Jeff Ray, Han Reichgelt, Denise Sanderson, Jessicake Smith, Vickie Spratling, Rebecca Tuck, Arthur Vaughn, Manole Voroneanu, Sarah Weldon and Wei Zhou

10 Years of Service – Melissa Akins, Trish Buchanan, Edward Bulick, Cressia Callahan, Terry Carter, Charles Duvall, Quint Hill, Richard Howard, Jeff Hughes, Orlando Karam, Scott Larisch, Brandon McLain, John Miller, Carl Murray, Patricia Pierce, Linda Powell, Elizabeth Rohr Adams, Roger Soiset and Mark Vickrey

15 Years of Service – Patsy Bowen, Jim Cooper, Lance Crimm, Carol Jelks, Ron Koger, Kai Qian, Teresa Street, Walt Thain and Tim Zeigler

20 Years of Service – Richard Bennett, Meg Dillon, Sheryl Duggins, Steven Edwards, Bill Hodges, Ann Mills and John Sweigart

25 Years of Service – Jerry Burgess Jr., Charles Cole, Alberta Cook, Pam Frinzi, Bill Hogan, Eddie McCracken, Bernice Nuhfer-Halten, Herb Smith and Sandra Weaver

30 Years of Service – James Whitenton

Retirees – Wilson (Bill) Barnes, Jerry Burgess, Roy Ford, Diana Harmon-Smith, Jon Lindsay, Carl Murray and Kathy Roddy

SPSU Partners in Education with Marietta STEM school
In March, SPSU signed a Partners in Education agreement with the Marietta Center for Advanced Academics (MCAA), which has just been named the first certified Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) school in Georgia.

The Partners in Education Program is a collective effort between the Cobb Chamber of Commerce, the Cobb County Public School system and the Marietta City Public School system to help build closer relationships between the public schools and other organizations within Cobb.

MCAA will work in particular with SPSU’s gaming faculty and students through the Games-for-Learning Program, working together to develop educational games aimed at 3rd to 5th graders.

As a result of the new partnership, SPSU will host the Second Annual Engineering Design Expo on Sun., April 29. Marietta’s STEM magnet students in grades 3-8 and students at Wheeler and McEachern high schools will display projects they have completed. The expo will be held in the SPSU Gymnasium from 2 to 4 p.m. and will showcase hands-on and minds-on engineering design challenges, digital research projects, artwork and more.

SPSU students win three ASCE awards
The university’s American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) student competition teams competed with teams from 24 other schools in 15 different activities during the 2012 ASCE Southeast Student Conference in Tallahassee, Fla., last month and brought home three awards.

Team members took second place in an ASCE T-shirt design competition, third place in a trivia competition on civil engineering and fifth place overall in the Steel Bridge Competition. The team’s overall performance ranked ninth out of the 24 institutions in the competition.

Dr. Fatih Oncul, assistant professor in CET and Prof. Nancy Turner, a CET lecturer, serve as advisors for the ASCE Student Chapter. Prof. Michael Orlandella, associate professor emeritus in CET, advises the Steel Bridge Team.

New science labs officially debut in Building E
Biology program faculty and staff members celebrated the official opening of two new biology labs on the ground floor of Building E on April 5.

“We are delighted to have this great new space to offer our students, and we are also looking forward to the upcoming opening of a new computer lab on this floor and an updated biotechnology and molecular biology lab on the second floor,” said Mark Sugalski, Biology program director, during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Among those who attended the ceremony was Tony Dodd, an environmental specialist at Georgia Power, who recently donated a series of colorful science-related posters that now grace the halls of this area of the building.

Dr. Kim receives GDOT grant for pavement research
Dr. Sung-Hee (Sonny) Kim, director of the Center for Georgia Aggregates Research (CGAR), has received a $57,000 grant from the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) to research the structural analyses of Georgia pavements.

CGAR was established in 2010 and serves industry and GDOT as a forum for research, consulting and discussion. The center has played a significant role in assisting GDOT with accurately identifying pavement structure and providing meaningful analyses of Georgia pavements.

Welcome back, Brichaya Shah
Brichaya Shah has returned to SPSU in the position of director of the instructional design unit in the Office of Faculty Support and Development. She previously worked in this position for five years.

Shah administers and manages all instructional design efforts at SPSU, including the Teaching Academy for Distance Learning, the online course development and review process, GeorgiaVIEW Vista and Wimba Live classroom. She will be taking the lead in the upcoming implementation of the Desire2Learn (D2L) learning management system, which will replace GeorgiaVIEW Vista in the future. She will plan the faculty training for D2L and work on the distance learning assessment rubric, among several other tasks.

SPSU to match REACH funds
SPSU will match funds for the state’s new needs-based REACH (Realizing Educational Achievement Can Happen) Scholarship program.

For the scholarship, students will be selected in middle school and will receive a renewable yearly tuition scholarship of $2,500 to be used at any HOPE eligible institution upon completion of the program.

Participants will sign a contract to maintain a certain grade average, remain crime-, drug- and behavior-issue-free and meet with a volunteer mentor until they graduate from high school. The parents of REACH students will also sign a contract to support their child throughout their education. Douglas, Rabun and Bulloch County School Systems will pilot the scholarship program.

SPSU is one of many Georgia colleges and universities that will match funds and support the REACH program, along with the University System of Georgia Foundation.

SPSU gets honorable mention in NSPS student competition
Students from SPSU’s Surveying and Mapping program presented a project that received an honorable mention in the 11th Annual National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) Student Competition last month in Portland, Ore.

The Surveying and Mapping Program is based in SPSU’s Civil Engineering Technology (CET) Department.

Eight schools with baccalaureate degree programs in surveying, surveying engineering technology and/or surveying engineering participated in the competition. Each team had four months to develop a project on this year’s theme, “Surveying Applications in Geographic Information Systems (GIS),” write a 30-page paper, prepare a GIS map and give a 25-minute presentation at the conference.

Timothy Gerth, Calvin Johnson, Antonio Sample and Lance Threewitt, all majoring in surveying and mapping, made up the SPSU team. Their advisors were surveying and mapping Prof. Daniel Lee Branham, a CET lecturer, and John Lee, a CET instructor.

The team chose as its topic “Floodplains and Elevation Certificates – Using Current and Preliminary Flood Maps for Future Planning.”

Have news to share?
If your department has an upcoming event or other news to share with the campus community, please send an e-mail with all the pertinent information to Diane Payne (dpayne@spsu.edu). To be considered for use in a specific issue of the SPSU Hornet’s Nest, a news item must be submitted no less than four weeks before the date of the issue.

Volume 5, Issue 15
April 18, 2012