Dannele Peck
Dannele Peck and Mary Williams in the UW College of Agriculture recently were recognized by the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA).
Peck, an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, received the organization's Teaching Award of Merit. Williams, a doctoral student in the Department of Renewable Resources, received the Graduate Student Teaching Award.
Jim Wangberg, associate dean and director of the Office of Academic and Student Programs, presented the awards.
"The College of Agriculture has an institutional membership in NACTA, and with that membership comes the annual opportunity to recognize both a faculty member and a graduate student for achievements in teaching," Wangberg says.
Department heads and program directors from the college are invited to suggest recipients and their input is taken into consideration when narrowing the field of nominees.
Peck, who joined the department in 2006, received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from UW and Ph.D. from Oregon State University. She received high praise from Associate Professor Roger Coupal, head of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, saying she is one of the department's top instructors.
"She teaches three highly quantitative and analytical courses -- range economics, graduate production economics and theory of the firm and an environmental and natural resources (ENR) class, risk analysis," Coupal says. "Her student course evaluations are always very high, and she is becoming a model of student-instructor and student-adviser relationships."
Williams began her Ph.D. program in 2005 and is a doctoral candidate in rangeland ecology and watershed management. This past semester she taught rangeland restoration ecology, a graduate course. Williams is conducting research to tie rangeland vegetation records and site descriptions with wildlife habitat characteristics and is supported by a graduate assistantship from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant.
"She is conducting some very unique and difficult data analysis to portray the spatial arrangement of vegetation on the landscape so she can relate it to density of breeding upland bird species at (northwest Colorado) Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge," writes Professor Ann Hild in the Department of Renewable Resources.
Posted on Monday, June 01, 2009