Three Faculty Honored with 2015 C.I. Noll Awards
The Eberly College of Science is proud to announce another induction into The C. I. Noll Award list. This award is important within the college because it offers students the opportunity to evaluate faculty members in a positive manner. Recipients are not selected solely on the number of votes received. Instead, the content of the nominations is greatly considered. The C. I. Noll Award recognizes faculty who have taken a special interest in students and who, through interactions with the students, have had a positive impact upon them. The selections were reviewed by the Science LionPride Awards Committee, the college’s student ambassador group.
For the first time in the history of awarding the C. I. Noll Award, two professors will receive joint recognition in the tenured category. Drs. Sarah Ades and Kenneth Keiler are both assistant professors of biochemistry and molecular biology, and were honored as a team because of their collaboration on the development, implementation, and assessment of Microbiology 202 and BMB 488. Microbiology 202 had been taught with little modification for 20 years. Drs. Ades and Keiler transformed this course by challenging students to formulate questions and design experiments to learn about the world around them, such as how the environment affects disease to isolating bacteria and bacterophages from their own skin to test how they interact. Sections of BMB 488 are also organized around research questions but shared by several independent labs. Students perform individual research and then meet in a weekly seminar to cover the skills that are important for being a scientist like how to read a scientific paper, how to present data and how public policy impacts science. Drs. Ades and Keiler are committed to improving science education and they frequently share their teaching approaches with other faculty at Penn State and beyond the University.
Dr. Sarah Ades joined the faculty at Penn State in 2002 and is the recipient of a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. Ades also received a Tombros Faculty Fellowship from the Center for Excellence in Science Education in 2012, and the Tershak Teaching Award from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2014.
Research in her laboratory seeks to explain the fundamental biology of cell-envelope sensing systems and then to develop methods to identify small molecule inhibitors of key pathways that can serve as lead compounds for antibiotic development and tools for basic research.
Prior to arriving at Penn State, Ades pursued postdoctoral work at the University of California at San Francisco and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. She received her bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University and her Ph.D. in biology from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Kenneth Keiler’s research focuses on how cells make protein, particularly under stressful conditions. He discovered and characterized a protein quality control system that is found in all bacteria and is required for growth or virulence in many pathogens. His goal is to understand the fundamental biochemistry, genetics, and cell biology of this system and related pathways, and to use this knowledge to develop antibiotics and tools for basic research.
Keiler also received a Tombros Faculty Fellowship from the Center for Excellence in Science Education in 2012, and a Tershak Teaching Award from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2014. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology with post-doctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Ilkirch, France.
Dr. Meredith Defelice is currently the director of curricular affairs and a senior lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and was the winner of the C.I. Noll non-tenured faculty award. She is an alumnus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded SPIRE postdoctoral program at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she received training and experience in both research and pedagogy.
Defelice came to Penn State in 2010, and since that time she has won teaching awards at the department level, the Paul M. Althouse Teaching Award, as well as the highest award for teaching excellence at the university level, the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has taught a variety of classes including large lecture classes, lab classes, and smaller elective classes. In her classes, Defelice has developed curriculum that incorporates active learning as well as peer instruction.
As part of her responsibilities, Defelice also coordinates the undergraduate learning assistants program for the BMB department and has trained the assistants to facilitate deeper discussions among small groups of students. During the summers, she is involved in outreach teaching as part of the Crime Scene Investigators Science-U summer camp through the Office of Science Outreach. She is currently a board member of the Penn State Eberly College of Science Center for Excellence in Science Education, and was a 2013-2014 Center for Excellence in Science Education Fellow.