To receive an Excellent rating, a faculty member should demonstrate leadership in teamwork, e.g. generating a spirit of teaming, building team consensus or capabilities, initiating teams that effectively address ISAT curriculum needs.
Prior to JMU, I was actively involved in managing teams and building consensus at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Our efforts were primarily focused around achieving consensus between electronics engineers, software engineers, and astrophysicists, to ensure that the capabilities we were delivering could help the scientific community achieve its research objectives. I also led the Observatory Computing Council in 2003 and 2004, which was an internal-external steering committee tasked with ensuring that the needs and interests of the scientific community were broadly satisfied through out computing roll-out plans.
At JMU, my efforts have been focused primarily on building strong competencies in teaching and course development. I have demonstrated leadership by 1) proposing and delivering the HON 300/ISAT 680 (Quality and Process Improvement in Action) course in Spring 2012 and 2013 in conjunction with the College of Business, 2) working with the Office of International Programs (OIP) to expand general education science offerings to international settings, and 3) advising student projects that have helped to inform curriculum decisions, e.g. a Recruit-a-Duke data mining project from ISAT/CS 344 (“Intelligent Data Mining to Verify IKM Curriculum”) that indicated teaching Visual Basic for ISAT 252 was not aligned with industry needs. This led to a more open approach for ISAT 252 where faculty are now able to select different instructional programming languages, based on industry trends and faculty strengths.