Four OU professors honored with 2009 Excellence Awards

Virinder Moudgil, OU’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, has announced the names of honorees for Oakland University’s 2009 Excellence Awards. They are Andrei Slavin, professor of physics; Huirong Fu, assistant professor of engineering; Barbara Penprase, assistant professor of nursing; and Masae Yasuda, special lecturer of Japanese.

Nominated by Oakland faculty, staff and students for their outstanding contributions to research and teaching, the four professors will be recognized at the fourteenth annual Faculty Recognition Luncheon on Founder’s Day, April 15.

“It is a pleasure to congratulate my colleagues who have contributed so richly to Oakland’s academic community and who have played transformative roles in the lives of our students,” Moudgil said.

Selected for the Research Excellence award, Slavin has published more than 130 research papers in linear and nonlinear spin wave dynamics in finite-size magnetic samples. He is currently researching areas of current-induced magnetization dynamics in magnetic nano-structures, Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons at room temperature and microwave signal processing using parametric interactions of spin waves in magnetic films.

Slavin joined Oakland University in 1991 after teaching for thirteen years at the St. Petersburg Marine Technical University in Russia and is a highly regarded investigator, according to Moudgil.

The New Investigator Research Excellence Award went to Fu, whose current research involves a collaborative National Science Foundation Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program grant to explore the first phase of a project titled, “Information Assurance and Security Education with a Multidisciplinary Collaborative Approach in a Realistic Environment.”

Fu, who joined the School of Engineering and Computer Science in 2005, also has received an Australian Research Council Linkage grant for a study titled, “Networked Ultra Wideband Radar Sensor for Positioning, Target Tracking and Communication in Urban Environments.”

Considered an inspirational mentor to her students, Penprase received the Teaching Excellence Award for her work with the School of Nursing (SON). Her specializations include medical-surgical nursing, critical care nursing, nurse leadership, organizational change and hospital administration and management.

Since joining OU in 1996, Penprase has helped develop the Accelerated Second Degree Nursing (ASDN) program and implement the online Registered Nurse to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (RN/BSN) program, along with her colleagues.

Yasuda earned the Excellence in Teaching Award, with a teaching style considered refreshing and innovative by students.

Her mission is to inspire students to learn the Japanese language in order to communicate with people and hone a skill, rather than simply to take another academic subject. In this way, she hopes to foster a lifelong desire to learn language for the sake of learning and function, and to increase students’ perspectives of different cultures.