Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce the 2023-2024 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Provost Fellows: Dawn Bohn, Food Science and Human Nutrition; Geoffrey Herman, Computer Science; Wenhao David Huang, Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership; and Chadly Stern, Psychology.
The Provost Fellows program was created to further develop leadership skills at the university level for some of our most accomplished tenured faculty. Each Provost Fellow focuses on a critical campus strategic initiative.
- Professor Bohn will focus on the campus mission to expand access through innovative undergraduate online education programs and opportunities. She is a teaching associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and serves as director of the online Master of Science in Food Science program. Professor Bohn explores instructional innovations, supports online education best practices, and serves as the advisor to all degree-seeking students. She has been recognized for providing award-winning instruction, advising, and curricular development through department, college, and campus-level awards and the NACTA professional organization.
- Professor Herman will focus on defining and implementing new approaches to evaluating teaching performance and training opportunities for faculty members. He is the Severns Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Grainger College of Engineering. His excellence in teaching has been recognized by the IEEE Education Society Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award and the Scott H. Fisher Computer Science Teaching Award. He helped found the Grainger College of Engineering’s Strategic Instructional Innovations Program, which has been empowering faculty innovation in teaching for over 10 years.
- Professor Huang will focus on the campus mission to expand access through innovative undergraduate online education programs and opportunities. He is a professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership in the College of Education and a Health Innovation Professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. His scholarship is focused on scaffolding decision-making processes in complex and diverse contexts. He also has contributed to designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating numerous online degree and non-degree programs since 2007.
- Professor Stern, serving his second term, will continue to work on evaluating the student impact of the general education program, with a focus on equity and access in coursework. He is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. His research broadly examines how belief systems and motivations guide the way people perceive and interact with the world. One central line of his work concerns how political belief systems shape the way in which people evaluate and categorize others based on group membership (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation).
Please join me in congratulating Professors Bohn, Herman, Huang, and Stern on their appointment as Provost Fellows. I look forward to the many contributions they will make to our campus during their terms.
Sincerely,
John Coleman
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
