Four Receive UB Arts and Sciences Faculty Teaching Award

BUFFALO, N.Y -- Four faculty members at the University at Buffalo have received the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award. The recipients each represent one of the four disciplines that comprise the university's College of Arts and Sciences - science and mathematics, arts, behavioral sciences and the humanities.

The award winners are Catherine Norgren, associate professor of theatre and dance and head of design and production for the Department of Theatre and Dance; Jiyuan Yu, assistant professor of philosophy; Jim D. Atwood, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry, and Jessie Poon, associate professor of geography.

The awards are designed to recognize superior teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the college. Factors considered include excellence in the classroom, the development of innovative teaching techniques, the use of technology in teaching and experience in teaching classes of varying sizes.

Catherine Norgren of Buffalo has designed costumes for numerous regional theaters, among them North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, Virginia Stage, Vermont Stage and Studio Arena Theatre of Buffalo, and has been a guest designer at Iowa State University and the University of Evansville, among others.

She is national chair of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF), a national theater program based at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., involving 18,000 students from colleges and universities nationwide. She also is a former national vice chair and former chair of Region II of KCACTF, which includes New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

As national vice chair of KCACTF, Norgren co-produced the first four National 10-Minute Play Festivals held in the Kennedy Center, working with eight student playwrights, eight student directors, eight faculty directors, 16 to 30 student actors and one stage manager for a week.

She earned a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College and a master of fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jiyuan Yu of Williamsville specializes in Greek philosophy, Chinese philosophy, metaphysics and ethics. He earned a master's degree from Renmin University in Beijing and a doctorate from the University of Guelph, Canada. He held a three-year, postdoctoral research post in philosophy at the University of Oxford, England, before joining the UB faculty in 1997.

Among his numerous publications are three books: "A Dictionary of Western Philosophy" (2001); "Rationality and Happiness: From the Ancients to the Early Medievals," co-edited with Jorge Gracia, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Philosophy at UB, which is forthcoming from the University of Rochester Press, and "Ethics in Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy," a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy -- of which he served as guest-editor -- to be published in September.

Jim D. Atwood of Amherst has been a member of the UB faculty since 1977. He conducts research in inorganic and organometallic chemistry, and is particularly interested in the reactivity and mechanistic studies of organometallic complexes. A recipient of the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, Atwood has served as a Humboldt Research Fellow and a fellow with the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Program of Cooperation in Homogeneous Catalysis. He is the author of several textbooks and 120 scientific papers, and is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Coordination Chemistry.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Southwest Missouri State University and a doctorate from the University of Illinois.

A UB faculty member since 1998, Jessie P.H. Poon of Buffalo also serves as director of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center in the UB Department of Geography. She taught at the National University of Singapore prior to joining the UB faculty.

Her research interests lie in the areas of international trade and foreign investment, regional economic development and Asian businesses. She is principle investigator on a $169,979 National Science Foundation grant entitled "Asian Foreign Investment in the U.S.: A Firm-Level Study of Technology Acquisition and Transfer."

The author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, Poon serves as North American editor of Papers in Regional Science and adjunct assistant editor of International Game Theory Review.

She received a doctorate in geography from The Ohio State University.