Cal State L.A. Outstanding Professors 1999-2000 Announced
Los Angeles-California State University, Los Angeles named its 1999-2000 Outstanding Professors at the University's Fall Faculty Day. Those honored were: Alan J. Bloom, Professor of Broadcasting; Cheryl A. Cruz, Professor of Accounting; Silvia P. Heubach, Assistant Professor of Mathematics; and Caroline H. McManus, Associate Professor of English. These awards are made primarily for excellence in teaching, but significant achievements are expected in scholarly inquiry or creativity, professional activities, and service to the campus and community.
As part of the annual faculty tradition, Cal State L.A. Professor of Physics Demetrius J. Margaziotis was selected as the recipient of the President's Distinguished Professor Award. This award recognizes superlative teaching and exceptional commitment to students as well as professional accomplishments and services. Only those professors who have previously been selected as Outstanding Professors are eligible for this award.
Alan J. Bloom, Professor of Broadcasting-College of Arts and Letters
Alan Bloom received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Sonoma State College (now University), graduating with Honors and Distinction. He earned his M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied with such avant-garde art world luminaries as video artist-sculptor-performance artist Nam June Paik, and poet and playwright Michael McClure. Bloom joined the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies at Cal State L.A. in 1981.
A highly recognized film and video writer, producer and director, Bloom is the recipient of three CINE Golden Eagles, four Tellys and numerous other awards for his work. A former program director of the Sony Video Center at the American Film Institute, Bloom has directed more than 250 music videos, documentaries, experimental films, TV programs and spots. Some of his projects, including several for PBS and The Learning Channel, have been broadcast internationally. He has worked with some of film and television's top performers, including Edward James Olmos, LeVar Burton, Bobby McFerrin, John Wesley Harding, Roy Scheider, Lillian Gish, Blythe Danner, Bob Saget, Nia Peeples and John Huston.
In 1985, Bloom initiated the first music video courses to be taught on a college campus at Cal State L.A. Bloom's teaching encompasses more than 20 different courses, and he has developed a wide range of film and video production classes. He has had more undergraduate award-winners in the nine-year history of the California State University statewide film and video competition than any other professor in the system, and his students are successfully employed at dozens of production companies and nearly every studio, network and station in the greater Los Angeles area.
For the past 14 years, he has been actively involved with the CSU Summer Arts program, for which he created high-intensity hands-on workshops in professional production techniques. This groundbreaking program has attracted the sponsorship of major entertainment industry companies such as Kodak, Fuji, Sony, and Warner Brothers.
Bloom is a San Fernando Valley (Shadow Hills) resident.
Cheryl A. Cruz, Professor of Accounting-College of Business and Economics
Cheryl A. Cruz received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an M.B.A. from Northeastern University, a J.D. from UCLA Law School and, in the area of taxation, her M.B.T. from USC. She is a California C.P.A. and a member of the State Bar of California. Currently the Chair of the Department of Accounting, Cruz has been a faculty member at Cal State L.A. since 1992.
During her years at Cal State L.A., Cruz has taught a variety of courses, including principles of accounting, managerial accounting and taxation of individuals, corporations and shareholders, partnerships and partners-receiving consistently superior evaluations from her students.
Cruz's commitment to her students is reflected in her tireless work to provide them with excellent career opportunities. For six years she has served as faculty adviser for the campus chapter of Beta Alpha Psi, a national accounting honors fraternity that has hosted an array of networking functions, including Mock Interviews, Meet the Firms Night, the Fall Awards Breakfast, the Spring Awards Banquet and the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program. Cruz's help in achieving "Superior Chapter" status for the chapter over the past two years has enabled four of its members to receive KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation scholarships. For the past six years Cruz has also been the faculty adviser for the Arthur Andersen Tax Challenge, a nationwide competition to stimulate student interest in taxation. Cruz's assistance in achieving "Honorable Mention" status for the Cal State L.A. accounting teams over the past two years has resulted in scholarships from Arthur Andersen to 12 accounting students.
On the Cal State L.A. campus, she has been active in at least 30 University, college and department committees and in 1999 received the College of Business and Economics award for "Excellence in Service" in recognition of this work. Cruz is a San Gabriel Valley (Altadena) resident.
Silvia P. Heubach, Assistant Professor of Mathematics-College of Natural and Social Sciences
Silvia Heubach completed undergraduate and master's degrees in mathematics and economics at the University of Ulm, Germany. Her graduate research at USC resulted in a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, as well as Outstanding Achievement and Outstanding Graduate Student Recognition awards. She joined the Cal State L.A. faculty in 1994 in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and has produced an outstanding record of eleven publications and twenty-two presentations since that time.
Heubach has received several grants and awards for curriculum development, including a $121,000 National Science Foundation Course and Curriculum Development Grant to explore new ways to teach the General Education mathematics course. In the summer of 1997, the NSF selected her to review course and curriculum development grant applications. Heubach's many presentations were both on the modeling course for non-science majors she developed with the NSF grant, as well as on her research in combinatorics and in applications of probabilistic models to computer science problems. At the University, she has been active on committees at all levels. As the only math faculty member on the Council on Health-Related Programs, she helped to bring about dialog between local high school and University educators, as well as a much-needed summer math workshop for high school students. She teaches courses ranging from Elementary Mathematics for Teachers, to Applied Probability for Computer Science, to Advanced Probability Theory.
Heubach is a member of Phi Kappa Phi honor society, and has memberships in the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is committed to opening career opportunities in mathematics to women, and is the faculty adviser for the student chapter of the MAA and the mathematics club. She is a resident of Santa Monica.
Caroline H. McManus, Associate Professor of English-College of Arts and Letters
Caroline McManus received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Occidental College, an M.A. in English from the University of Exeter, England, and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA. She joined Cal State L.A.'s English faculty in 1993 as a specialist in English Renaissance literature, as well as in early modern and contemporary women writers.
McManus has compiled an impressive record of scholarly research with a feminist, historicist approach: her forthcoming book, Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and the Fashioning of Female Readers (University of Delaware Press) argues that Spenser's female audience included many non-royal women who exercised significant political and religious power in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Her current work in progress, a book-length study, focuses on the relationships between women and fools in Shakespeare's plays.
McManus' teaching covers a wide range, from introductory composition to graduate-level courses in her field. "I particularly enjoy teaching the credential capstone course, Literary Study and the Teaching Profession, on a regular basis," she says. She notes that, partly as a result of her participation in a yearlong National Endowment for the Humanities Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., she now includes performance work in almost all of her literature classes.
That McManus' teaching successfully incorporates this research is borne out by enthusiastic student evaluations praising her "interesting and dynamic approach" that "reaches the hearts and minds of students." "Even my mother wants to read some of [poet John] Milton's work now that I've talked her ear off about him," wrote one student. In addition to her teaching and research, she has participated on various University, college and department committees including Retention, Tenure and Promotion, Faculty Affairs and Undergraduate Studies, and serves as one of the principal undergraduate advisers for her department.
McManus lives in Pasadena with her husband Jim and daughter Lora.
President's Distinguished Professor:
Demetrius J. Margaziotis, Professor of Physics, College of Natural and Social Sciences
Demetrius Margaziotis received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA, where his thesis adviser was Byron Wright-one of the pioneers in the development of proton cyclotron accelerators. He is currently in his 37th year at Cal State L.A., having begun as an instructor on the faculty of Physics and Astronomy while he was a graduate student. A full professor since 1973, Margaziotis was named a Cal State L.A. Outstanding Professor in 1977. He has been a visiting faculty member at nuclear physics research institutes in Athens, Greece and Zagreb, Croatia, and has held numerous visiting professor appointments at UCLA. He received an Outstanding Teaching Award in Physics from the UCLA Physics department in 1983.
Throughout his long career at Cal State L.A. he has maintained an inspiring research record in the area of experimental nuclear physics, where he has distinguished himself as a member of national and international collaborations at the Bates Linear Accelerator Center at MIT, Boston, Massachusetts, the MAMI Microtron Facility at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany and the TRIUMF Meson Facility at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
His most recent research has been conducted at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Newport News, Virginia. This laboratory houses the newest and most powerful electron accelerator in the world, producing high intensity electron beams with energies up to 6 billion electron volts. Since the laboratory's inception, Margaziotis has been involved in the design and development of some of its highly specialized apparatus. For more than 10 years, he has been part of the Jefferson Lab's Hall A collaboration of over 100 physicists from more than 10 countries, and has participated in all of the inaugural experiments done in the Hall A experimental area.
The research with which he is involved at the Jefferson Lab focuses on aspects of nuclear reactions that investigate the structure of very light nuclei and the internal structure of protons and neutrons. These studies also explore the region where the traditional understanding of nuclei is not sufficient to explain nuclear phenomena and the presence of quarks and gluons-the most basic building blocks of matter-must be taken into account. Margaziotis and two Cal State L.A. colleagues from Department of Physics and Astronomy are the only scientists representing the California State University at this major facility.
For 23 years to the present, Margaziotis has been a co-principal investigator with Cal State L.A. physics professor Martin Epstein on numerous research grants from the National Science Foundation. He is coauthor of more than 90 publications in major refereed journals including Physical Review Letters and Physical Review-two of the most prestigious research journals in physics.
Margaziotis served the Department of Physics and Astronomy as department chair for 12 years. He has served on many University, college and department committees, and has been an elected member of the campus' Academic Senate since 1971. Particularly interested in teaching undergraduate physics to aspiring scientists and engineers,
Margaziotis has played a leading role over the past several years in bringing innovation to introductory physics instruction on the Cal State L.A. campus-with an emphasis on bringing an active learning environment into the physics classroom. He and his wife, Valerie, are long-time residents of Pacific Palisades, where they raised their now grown sons, Ian and Philip.
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