Four School of Business faculty members were honored this year. They are:
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Dr. Ben Wier, left, Faculty Council Chair and professor of Accounting, presents Distinguished Service Award to Dr. George Kasper, professor of Information Systems. |
GEORGE KASPER, Ph.D. – DISTINGUISHED SERVICE
George M. Kasper serves as the USA/Association for Computing Machinery Representative to the Technical Committee on Information Systems of the International Federation for Information Processing, a United Nations UNSECO initiative. Domestically, he is a member of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s Computer Accreditation Commission, which is responsible for overseeing accreditation of all accredited computing programs. Dr. Kasper also serves as a member of both the Executive Committee and the International Committee of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board, the lead society for CS, IS and IT programs within the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
Dr. Kasper has served on several School-wide committees, and he is Chair of the Department of Information System’s Governance Committee that revised the Department’s Bylaws, Roles and Rewards, Three-Year Review, and Promotion and Tenure documents. Through VCU’s Community Services Associates Program, he has worked with many local nonprofits, including Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN), Legal Information Network for Cancer (LINC), The Valentine Richmond History Center, and the Association for the Support of Children with Cancer (ASK).
Kasper is past Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest on Management Information Systems, and is the Association for Information Systems’ current Representative Director to the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board. He is a former trustee of the Steward School, a former member of the Board of the Greater Richmond Technology Council, and a member of the 2002 class of Leadership Metro Richmond. He is author or co-author of dozens of journal articles and several book chapters on information systems. MIT Press, Sage Publications, and others have reprinted his papers, and professional groups including the Society for Information Management have honored his work.
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Dr. Ben Wier, right, Faculty Council Chair and professor of Accounting, presents the Award of Excellence to Dr. Roland Weistroffer, professor of Information Systems.
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ROLAND WEISTROFFER, Ph.D. – AWARD OF EXCELLENCE Roland Weistroffer received his Ph.D. from Free University of Berlin, Germany, in applied mathematics in 1976; Master of Arts and mathematics from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is a member of the Information Systems department faculty. He is a prolific writer and researcher, with 30 journal articles, 12 book chapters, and more than 50 conference proceedings. His areas of research interests are in Software Engineering, Decision Support Systems, Conceptional modeling, portfolio decision making, and Economics of Information Technology.
Dr. Weistroffer teaches undergraduate and graduate classes as well as doctoral level seminars. He also is the recipient of a Dean’s Seminar Summer Grant for research and in February 2007 presented “Information Technology Investments: Identifying Success Factors”. He has acted as referee for several journals and conferences, as well as the National Science Foundation, and was the Educational Vice-President of the Richmond chapter of the Data Processing Management Association,
He has served on numerous different committees such as the University Faculty Senate, University Council, University Grievance Panel, University Graduate Council, and others. Prior to coming to VCU, he was a Chief Research Officer at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria, South Africa.
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Dr. Ben Wier, right, Faculty Council Chair and professor of Accounting, congratulates Dr. Michael McDaniel, professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior, Management Department, as the School of Business Distinguished Scholar, left.
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MICHAEL McDANIEL, Ph.D. – DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR
This is Mike McDaniel’s ninth year at VCU where he is a Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior in the Department of Management. Mike received his Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology at the George Washington University in 1986. He has previously worked for the Department of Defense, Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and the University of Akron. Dr. McDaniel is nationally recognized for his research and practice in personnel selection system development and validation. Mike has published in several major journals including the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Intelligence. He is a member of the Academy of Management and was elected as a Fellow in the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the Association of Psychological Science. His current research interests include situational judgment tests, applications of meta-analysis to management topics, publication bias, demographic differences in the workplace, and the estimation of the mean intelligence of people in local, state, and national geographical units. He also has been named a CARMA Fellow and frequently contributes to presentations made by the VCU Center for the Advancement of Research Methods and Analysis.
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Dr. Ben Wier, right, Faculty Council Chair and professor of Accounting, presents the Distinguished Teaching Award to Jeff Babb, professor of Information Systems, left. |
JEFF BABB, DISTINGUISHED TEACHING
Jeff Babb has been a collateral faculty member in the Information Systems Department since 2001. He teaches the undergraduate programming subjects in the Department. These courses are technical in nature and require a great deal of student/teaching activities. Babb has mentored two teams to be national champions in Microsoft’s Software Design Competition. Microsoft only recruits at 25 schools national. VCU is now one of those schools, due in large part due to Jeff.
Last year, the Java language introduced generics into the language. This is a huge shift in syntax requiring a great deal of new material to be developed and added to the course. This is analogous to adding templates to C++ or when we shifted from procedural languages to object-oriented languages.
Another example of his teaching excellence is his willingness to teach the .NET elective. The .NET platform is the platform from Microsoft for developing applications on the PC. It is the platform used by students in the Imagine Cup. Jeff is the faculty member who mentored these students. He started in November of 2004 spending many hours with three teams of students. He traveled to Redmond, WA with the three teams and then went to Japan with the VCU National Champs. Students from all three teams will attest to that his input was critical. I view this as way above and beyond the call to duty as Jeff did these activities over and above his normal teaching load. He repeated the process again in 2005-2006 academic year and a VCU team won. This team and Jeff traveled to India for the International Championship. This demonstrates Jeff’s firm commitment to the teaching profession and I am proud to call him a fellow teacher.
Comments compiled from nomination letters |
