FSU Announces 2021 Faculty Achievement Award Winners

Jun 2, 2021 9:45 AM

Frostburg State University announces the recipients of the 2021 Faculty Achievement Awards from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and College of Business.

This year’s awardees are Dr. Ali Ashraf, Department of Marketing and Finance, and Dr. Molly S. Hartzog, Department of English and Foreign Languages, for teaching; Dr. Justin Dunmyre, Department of Mathematics, and Dr. Evan H. Offstein, Department of Management, for academic achievement; and Dr. Michael B. Flinn, Department of Computer Science and Information Technologies, and Dr. Lei “Lilly” Ye, Department of Marketing and Finance, for university and community service.

Ashraf is recognized for his dedication to student success. During his eight years at Frostburg, Ashraf has taught courses in all modalities, from in-person to online, always enriching instruction with experiential activities and exercises. He serves students in the Department of Marketing and Finance on the main campus in Frostburg and with FSU’s educational partner campus, Hunan University of Technology and Business in Changsha, China. Students praise him for his sincerity, knowledge and unique ability to create a safe, positive learning environment while maintaining high expectations and passion for the field.

Since her arrival at FSU, Hartzog has implemented innovative, high-impact, collaborative assignments in her professional writing courses in the Department of English and Foreign Languages. Her courses serve students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and are rated as highly effective and engaging. Her creative pedagogy, grounded in experiential and student-centered practices, demonstrates a commitment to student success and career preparation. Hartzog is also a member of the University’s Excellence in Academic Advising Taskforce, where she advocates for the holistic approach she takes to advising students.

Dunmyre, the chair of the Department of Mathematics, has focused his research on the scholarship of teaching and learning. This research has led to the publication of his work in “PRIMUS,” a journal that focuses on the teaching of undergraduate mathematics. Based on this work, Dunmyre and his co-authors were first invited to present an hour-long workshop on their paper and then based on the feedback, were invited by the Mathematics Association of America to present this work as part of a webinar series on assessment. He has also been asked to present on his teaching to new mathematics doctoral students at Project NExT, a national teaching development program. An impressive aspect of his work has been his merging of mathematics with addition fields of study, resulting in a reduction of silos across the discipline.

Offstein has been a prolific publisher in his three primary areas of research: ethical/honorable leadership, along with moral reasoning and judgement; instructional design and techniques, pedagogy and elements related to management learning; and executive coaching and its functionality. Many of his publications have appeared in elite journals in the field of management, he has won three “Best Paper” awards in the past six years and was recently honored with the highly prestigious “Best Field Report Paper” at the 2020 Academy of Management Annual Conference in the Management Consulting Division. In the words of his department chair, “His work brings much praise and esteem to FSU, in general, and to our AACSB accredited College, in particular.”

Flinn is the chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Technologies. As he put it, over his career at FSU, he has never stopped being passionate about education. He has served as a faculty senator for many years, as chair of the Institutional Priority and Resources Committee for three years and as chair of the Graduate Council Committee for two years. He has been a member of Excellence in Academic Advising since its inception and serves as a co-chair on the Steering Committee for Technology in Advising. Flinn’s services connect the community to the University through projects such as Allegany County’s P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School) efforts for Allegany County Public Schools and 4H Tech Club. He also works with the Maryland Consortium for Computation Education to place more computing educators in K-12 in Maryland. He has been instrumental in the development of the Capital CoLab project, which promotes partnerships between employers and universities in the region. As one of his colleagues described him, “He is your ‘go to’ guy as you can count on him to be there and to get the job done!”

A longtime member of the Faculty Promotion and Tenure Subcommittee, Ye advocates for faculty colleagues across all disciplines and works passionately to curtail campus bullying; in her words, “A fair and respectful working environment is what we all ask for.” Countless students have benefited from her work as Marketing Club advisor; she has led field trips to Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore and fielded a team that won awards in the New York City competition against Yale and NYU. As coordinator of the University’s partnership with Hunan University of Technology and Business, she was instrumental in securing Hunan’s Middle States accreditation. As incoming vice president of the Association of Collegiate Marketing Educators, she helped organize the group’s historic virtual conference in March 2021. Ye lives by the credo she expresses in her self-statement: “One’s value lies in serving others well.”

For more information, contact the FSU Office of the Provost at 301-687-4211.

Situated in the mountains of Allegany County, Frostburg State University is one of the 12 institutions of the University System of Maryland. FSU is a comprehensive, residential regional university and serves as an educational and cultural center for Western Maryland. For more information, visit the University web site or Facebook site. Follow FSU on Twitter @frostburgstate.