CAS celebrates excellence in 3rd annual ceremony

Brian Trapp

Director of Disability Studies and director of the Kidd Creative Writing Workshops

Brian Trapp is a deeply impactful teacher and mentor whose students consistently praise both the quality of his teaching and the generosity of his support outside the classroom. Through office hours, mentorship, and countless letters of recommendation, he has had a profound effect on undergraduate students.

His teaching also expands students’ intellectual horizons by introducing them to disability literature and perspectives they might never otherwise encounter. His expertise in this area enriches our curriculum and our students’ understanding of literature and lived experience.

Brian is also an accomplished novelist. His recent novel “Range of Motion” has received significant attention for its compassionate exploration of disability, family, and care.

Corbett Upton

Teaching Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in English

Corbett’s teaching sets the standard within the department for active learning, thoughtful mentorship, and rigorous engagement with students.

Students often praise his supportiveness and communication, the high quality of his feedback on assignments, and the diversity and inclusivity of his course materials.

As associate director of undergraduate studies, he’s advised thousands of English majors and regularly serves as a faculty advisor and sponsor to student groups and organizations. He also works diligently with students to enhance career readiness.

Desiree Rhodes

Communications and project coordinator for CAS’s Division of Administrative Services

Desiree has played a major role in creating and stabilizing the administrative infrastructure across CAS. One of her great skills is leading mission-driven conversations and guiding projects in a way that meets the assigned objectives while taking into account individual units’ needs.

Colleagues consistently describe her as someone who listens carefully, builds trust, and helps people navigate difficult work collaboratively.

She consistently goes above and beyond, completing tasks with excellence and attention to detail.

The Chemistry Teaching Labs Team

Marissa Burden-Dyke, Mark Detweiler, Joann Jarvis, Nika Jin, Autumn Paparo, Mia Ramos, and Aus Tichenor/em>

This team supports one of the college’s largest and most complex teaching enterprises, serving up to 1,100 students each term through hands-on laboratory instruction in both large general chemistry labs and in lab classes for chemistry and biochemistry majors. They keep the chemistry department’s teaching lab enterprise running smoothly and safely.

Their work is essential, often invisible, and consistently excellent. They maintain high-quality experiential learning environments while managing enormous operational complexity with professionalism and care.

Kemi Balogun

Associate professor in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the African Studies Program in the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages

Kemi combines intellectual leadership with extraordinary community-building and mentorship.

She has been instrumental in the ongoing success and vibrancy of the African Studies Program and coordinates the African Studies Lecture Series drawing on her international network of scholarly affiliates in African studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Through her community work, Kemi has effectively bridged UO with African communities in and beyond campus.

Her mentoring has also supported dozens of graduate and undergraduate students, many of whom are international students.

Bonnie Mann

Professor of Philosophy

Through her leadership on diversity and inclusion efforts within Philosophy, Bonnie has helped transform departmental culture and strengthen support for underrepresented students.

She has helped make the department more inclusive by recruiting a truly diverse group of students each year and by helping current GEs be better mentors to minority students.

One especially important example is the Black Thought Matters Initiative, which helped the department better understand and respond to the experiences of Black students through curriculum review, mentoring, and community engagement.

Bonnie’s teaching and leadership consistently model inclusivity, reflection, and care.

Prison Education Program

The program brings together incarcerated and campus-based students in shared educational experiences that are transformative for everyone involved.

In bringing together our campus community and those who are behind bars through opportunities to learn together, they foster unique courses and conversations, with students from both sides of the prison walls coming from a very wide range of backgrounds.

To date, 15 incarcerated or recently released participants have graduated from the University of Oregon with an average GPA of 3.9. Hundreds of UO students have also participated in prison-based education programs, often describing them as among the most meaningful experiences of their college careers.

The program reflects the university at its best: rigorous, humane, inclusive, and committed to expanding access to education.

Zena Ariola

Professor of Computer Science

Zena is a builder of institutions and scholarly communities. Her work consistently benefits not just individuals, but entire scholarly ecosystems.

Through the development of the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School in 2002, Zena brought international visibility to UO and CAS while providing generations of young scholars, many from underrepresented backgrounds, access to first-rate mentoring, advanced coursework, and professional networks.

She has also served on more than 50 international program committees and has chaired several of the field’s most prestigious conferences. She is a highly sought contributor and partner in her field.

Zena does not merely perform service; she creates enduring institutions, improves systems, and raises standards.

Amy Sibul

Internships and career readiness director in Human Physiology

Amy is one of those rare people who shows up as a leader, a teacher, an advisor, a builder, and a steady friend to anyone who works with her.

Amy created from scratch one of the most successful internship and career readiness systems in the college. Her work helps students not only secure opportunities, but also understand their own goals, strengths, and futures.

She is also one of the 20 career leaders helping to embed the NACE career competencies into the curriculum— work that positions the college as a national leader in connecting liberal arts education to life and work after graduation.

Ben Saunders

Professor of English and co-founder of the Cartoon and Comics Studies program

Ben has been an extraordinarily innovative and successful researcher, teacher, and institution-builder at the UO.

He’s worked tirelessly to advance and institutionalize comics and cartoon studies as a field of scholarly inquiry and to deliver public scholarship.

This passion for the subject, and his leadership, led to the creation of the comics and cartoon studies minor program in 2011, the first such program in the country. The University of Oregon is now an internationally renowned center for research and teaching in the field of comics and cartoon studies.

His research has included the curation of multiple highly successful comics and cartoon exhibits for museums, primarily around the super hero comic genre.

His major recent research achievement in the area of super hero comics was as the series editor for a new venture between Marvel and Penguin Classics.

It is a landmark series in the public humanities, and in recognition of his work he won the Inkpot Award in 2023.

Student and peer feedback tells the story of an impeccably engaged teacher, always seeking out improvements to his classes and keen to develop new material. Ben supports important teaching assignments on campus and never shirks the time-consuming and steady work of providing students with personalized feedback.

And don’t let the work in comics studies distract you from his background in Renaissance Studies and poetry, both of which he fosters in the English department.

Josh Roering

Professor of Earth Sciences

Josh is an internationally recognized geomorphologist whose research has reshaped understanding of landscape evolution, landslides, wildfire impacts, and natural hazards.

Josh played a central role in the development of the Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH), a major NSF center funded in 2025, positioning UO as a national leader in hazard science and resilience research.

In landslide science, his group has produced influential work linking between atmospheric rivers, subduction-zone earthquakes, and slope instability in the Pacific Northwest; on post-fire sediment transport and debris-flow hazards in Oregon; and on community-driven hazard monitoring and early warning systems in Southeast Alaska.

This portfolio reflects not only scholarly depth but also an ability to build interdisciplinary teams and translate results into actionable public tools.

Many of the scientific observations and calculations Josh has made are now aiding applied efforts to mitigate hazards.

And to top it all off, Josh is a dedicated and innovative teacher and outstanding mentor to graduate students. He is an excellent shepherd of undergraduate students in lower-division courses, pointing them to pathways into earth sciences.

Maureen Zalewski Regnier

Professor of Psychology and Director of Clinical Training

Maureen has made extraordinary contributions as a researcher, teacher, mentor, clinical leader, and institution-builder.

Maureen’s research focuses on early developmental implications for children of parents with severe psychopathology. Her scholarly productivity and impact have been recognized through numerous awards, including a Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science and an Early Career Award from the Society for Research in Child Development.

Her work integrating Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with parent training has been recognized as especially innovative and has established her as an internationally recognized scholar in clinical psychology.

In her role as Director of Clinical Training, Dr. Zalewski performs work that is essential to the operation of the clinical psychology program. She has brought an extraordinary level of effort, competence, and professionalism to the role.

Maureen, representing the Department of Psychology at the university level, played a central role in envisioning and helping launch the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. Her work helped lay the foundation for a new behavioral health profession and curriculum—efforts that are now influencing programs at universities across the country.

Maureen has made truly exceptional contributions to the university—and to the field.

Alison Carter

Associate professor of anthropology

Since joining CAS in 2017, Alison has helped develop anthropology’s undergraduate program. Her classroom teaching is known to be outstanding, including in large enrollment courses.

Alison plays an important role in undergraduate program leadership and cultivating the department’s undergraduate community. She serves as anthropology’s current Director of Undergraduate Studies, and on the Executive Committee and supports the Anthropology Club.

Alison takes mentorship seriously, working closely with undergraduates on research projects, including lab-based independent study projects and the development of a course that mentors students in conducting original research on archaeological materials. She promotes career readiness and is a member of the Provost’s Teaching Academy.

Alison’s teaching also fosters an inclusive learning environment and helps students develop critical thinking skills using archaeological examples to debunk pseudoscience.

Laurel Pfeifer-Meister

Associate teaching professor in biology

Laurel is being recognized and honored for her outstanding impact leading instruction of the Honors/Accelerated Biology 280 series for the last 10 academic years.

Because she teaches across the entire series, Laurel serves as the bridge between students’ desire to attain the skills toward a career related to research or health and their encounters with the theory and content of biology.

Through her original programs and resources, she guides students to opportunities to conduct research in a diverse range of fields that open their eyes to potential career paths, sealing their interest in the field and the department.

She provides mentorship to tenure-track faculty, GEs and undergraduate lab assistants every year. She promotes engagement via community-building in and out of the classroom, and continually emphasizes the benefits of peer relationship building among students.

Colin Williamson

Assistant professor in cinema studies

Across his teaching, Colin consistently creates intellectually rigorous, highly organized, and memorable courses. His course designs offer multiple pathways for participation and success, recognizing that students arrive with different backgrounds, learning styles, and forms of expertise.

Colin is internationally recognized for his research in early cinema, animation, and media archaeology. One of Colin’s achievements was the development of Hands-On Film History.

The class bridges theory and practice in ways that resonate strongly with UO’s commitment to experiential and creative learning, while also modeling leadership in curricular design and pedagogical innovation.

Colin’s ability to imagine such a course and make it happen is just one of the reasons he’s receiving the Tykeson Teaching Award