Professor Matt Gray, who oversees the Wyoming Trauma Treatment Telehealth Clinic, meets with graduate students Sarah Steinmetz and Kendal Binion.
When you think of the impact professors make in a community, you probably think of the classroom and the many lives they touch through teaching. While this is indeed a core impact, University of Wyoming professors serve the state far beyond the classroom through their outreach, research and special projects.
UWyo Magazine invited nominations of outstanding professors who are making a difference across the state. We received a windfall of impressive suggestions from every college—so much so that we hope to make this an annual feature. Here, we introduce you to 10 of UW’s professors who help make life in the Cowboy State even better.
Thanks to the efforts of psychology Professor Matt Gray, Wyoming survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence in Rawlins, Cheyenne and Gillette can receive free, evidence-based therapy via the Wyoming Trauma Treatment Telehealth Clinic.
“Wyoming is certainly a state above all others that can really benefit from and effectively utilize distal (distance) technologies to try to connect rural populations with specialized university services,” Gray says. “We currently have three sites—Wyoming Safe House in Cheyenne, Gillette Abuse Refuge Foundation and Carbon County COVE in Rawlins. They’re all sexual assault and domestic violence agencies that provide tremendous support and services to the clients they serve, but a lot of times these centers would tell us they had difficulty getting trauma-focused, specialized therapy services for folks who have those needs.” Gray hopes to expand the clinic to other rural communities if consistent funding is secured.
Using encrypted software, psychology doctoral students provide therapy via video conferencing. “This is a natural, symbiotic relationship because our clinic is staffed by Ph.D. students in the psychology department,” says Gray, who trained at the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center and National Center for PTSD. “This telehealth project has allowed us to make sure UW students get a very concentrated experience with these issues.”
The clinics are also cost-effective. “There’s no cost to clients, and there’s virtually no cost to the distal agencies. The only cost that we incur when I write a grant is just a graduate assistant. All of the monies go toward supporting the training of doctoral students who are working on a Ph.D. and to serve a very needy population in the state who might not otherwise have services,” says Gray, who currently serves on the Wyoming Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Board of Directors and the Wyoming State Board of Psychology.
The first trauma telehealth clinic opened in Rawlins seven years ago, and clinic results are impressive. “We have pretty consistent and significant reduction in PTSD symptoms and depressive symptoms,” Gray says, adding that client, therapist and advocate staff satisfaction with the clinics is also extremely high.
When it comes to early childhood education across the state, you can bet Professor Michelle Buchanan, department head of Elementary and Early Childhood Education, is involved. Since joining UW in 1997, she has been instrumental in developing a number of outreach initiatives, including the distance certificate program for early childhood special education teachers. “At any given time, we have an average of 40 students enrolled in the program,” Buchanan says. “Of those, 95 percent are currently working in child development centers all over the state.”
As the administrator for early childhood programs, Buchanan also oversees two other programs with distance options via the UW Outreach School—a birth-to-8 endorsement and a birth-to-5 certificate program.
“It’s just not reasonable to expect that all people can come here to access these programs,” she says of the distance options. “It’s important that everyone have access to the opportunity to continue their education. I love it because it puts me in direct connection with the educational settings that my students work in.”
Buchanan’s efforts don’t end there. “Another big part of my work in the past 10 years has been to serve on state committees, including Wyoming Kids First, Child Development Services of Wyoming and the Wyoming Early Childhood State Advisory Council,” she says. “I was able to help with the development of the new Wyoming Early Learning Foundations for preschool-age children. This publication is currently being disseminated throughout the state.”
The UW Outreach School is offering a 1-credit distance class to help nontraditional students—including home-based and center-based child care providers—understand how to use the Early Learning Foundations. The early childhood program also partners with the UW Literacy Research Center and Clinic to post video training modules on its website and to coordinate outreach efforts.
“We’re fortunate to have Excellence in Early Childhood Education funds provided by the Ellbogen Foundation,” Buchanan says. “These funds allow us to sponsor conferences for early care and education professionals. Funds also allow faculty to do outreach across the state. Last year we conducted 22 workshops with more than 500 participants.” And these funds support on-site consultation to programs. Last year, the early childhood program provided individual child consultations to nearly 50 different classrooms across Wyoming.
Thanks to Buchanan’s and the College of Education’s many outreach efforts, children, families, child care workers and teachers in Wyoming receive the ongoing training, support and expertise they need to succeed.
Whether it’s assessing salary ranges or predicting future turns in the economy, economics Associate Professor Robert Godby’s research helps the state make important decisions.
“I got into economics because I wanted to make a difference. I always wanted to try to make public policy a little better,” says Godby, who serves as director of the School of Energy Resources’ Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy.
“It’s a great opportunity for our students and our faculty to become more engaged in the state,” he says of the research opportunities. “It’s also a really good value for the state because you get local knowledge, and there’s a lot of expertise here. In addition, you don’t have to pay a high-priced consultant, so it’s a good value to taxpayers.”
Godby began his state work for the Wyoming Department of Education back in 2001. “I helped develop some of the original ideas for the school funding model,” he says. This included assessing teacher salaries across the state. His service to the state doesn’t end there. States must pay a minimum wage for skilled occupations in construction based on current prevailing wages. For the past 12 years, Godby has provided these estimates for Wyoming. “That has allowed the state to really have a continuous process where they use external academic knowledge to do this,” he says.
Much of Godby’s research focuses on how energy economies are affected by changes in energy cycles. Seeking this knowledge, the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority approached UW and Godby in 2014 to look at the future of coal revenues in Wyoming. “We were the only state in the country to actually have a project like this as the EPA’s Clean Power Plan proposal was being discussed nationally, so it’s gotten a lot of press,” he says.
“The project attempts to evaluate how coal production in the state might change over time. The numbers are dramatic. We think that coal could be reduced by anywhere from 25 to 50 percent by the 2030s.
“The state commissioned this study because they need to be able to see what’s around the corner.”
One of Godby’s current studies involves six UW departments. The colleagues received a $4.25 million Department of Energy-EPSCoR grant to research wind farm modeling, transmission grid monitoring and the economics derived from wind-generated power.
Godby and the College of Business are also working with the Southeast Wyoming Economic Development District to collect data and make it available to firms thinking of relocating to Wyoming. “The university could be a central part of partnering with people around the state to help with economic development and diversifying the economy,” Godby says.
The population of adults age 65 and older continues to grow in the United States. “For Wyoming, our projected growth rate for the older population between now and 2030 places us third in the nation,” says Associate Professor of psychology Christine McKibbin, project director of the Wyoming Geriatric Workforce Education Program at UW. “We’re a frontier state, so that makes challenges apparent in terms of access to medical care, access to specialty care and recruitment of care providers with geriatric expertise. So, we must prepare the existing workforce to meet the needs of our rapidly aging state.”
Enter the new Wyoming Center on Aging. “The center is the umbrella organization for everything we are doing, including resources for health care professionals, for faculty, for students and also for the public,” says McKibbin. “Within that, we received a $2.5 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that will fund us through 2018.
“This funding will allow us to do a lot of exciting things in each of the center’s core service areas. For example, we will be able to provide ongoing training to health care professionals with an emphasis on primary care. The focus for that would be creating geriatric expertise within primary care practices throughout the state and also creating the environment where we can train students—our pipeline of health care professionals.
“We also have an Alzheimer’s On-the-Road program, where we have an expert team that goes to rural communities to provide training to current health professionals,” McKibbin says.
“An exciting component of what we’re able to do now is to actually reach out and provide services directly to older adults and family caregivers in the state,” she says of the grant.
“We are excited that we can partner with health and community organizations to implement chronic disease self-management trainings throughout our state. We also are partnering with First Layer Health to bring innovative technology solutions for care management such as mobile- and television-based, real-time communication to support older residents.”
McKibbin says partnerships with agencies and organizations throughout the state of Wyoming are key to the center’s goals: “I love the partnerships that we’re able to create and how we can leverage our resources and work together with other agencies to do good work. In geriatrics, especially in a state like Wyoming, you don’t want to do this work alone. You find strength in numbers.”
Through her research and mentorship, Assistant Professor of Latina/o studies and English Vanessa Fonseca helps Latino students and residents connect with their heritage.
“Assistant Professor Lilia Soto and I are faculty advisors for MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán)—a UW student organization that focuses on education, empowerment and cultural knowledge of Chicanos,” Fonseca says. “MEChA has been a registered student organization for more than 40 years at UW and has helped Chicano and Latino students to better connect with their heritage as a means to create positive social change.
“In the Latina/o Studies Program, we provide students with conference opportunities, speaking engagements and work with other programs around campus to prepare Latinos and non-Latinos to think critically, embrace cultural diversity and become leaders,” she says. “These students are breaking traditional boundaries in their own families and communities by being the first in their families to go to college and providing important pathways for younger generations.
“Many of our students have a strong commitment to the state of Wyoming; thus, we are creating a new generation of leaders who are devoted to diversity, social change and empowerment that can be very impactful throughout the state.”
In addition to her mentoring work with UW students, Fonseca helps document and celebrate Latino contributions to Wyoming. “I am working with the American Heritage Center and a UW Manito Trail research team—Robert Perea, Adam Herrera and a University of New Mexico professor and graduate student, Levi Romero and Trisha Martínez—on a project titled Following the Manito Trail: Los nuevomexicanos en Guayomín (Wyoming),” she says. “The project celebrates the cultural legacy of New Mexicans to the Wyoming landscape. Many of these families migrated to Wyoming in the late 1800s or early 1900s to work in agriculture, sheepherding and railroad industries.
“AHC will host a Latinos in Wyoming exhibit in fall 2017 that will highlight some of the images and interviews that we collect. In spring 2018, this exhibit will travel throughout Wyoming in an effort to return the narratives and photos to the communities in which they were created,” Fonseca says.
“The No. 1 goal here is to show that Manitos (and all Latinos) in Wyoming have made significant contributions to the state of Wyoming and need to be celebrated for all they do in this state—politically, socially and culturally.”
With a passion for outreach education, religious studies Professor Paul V.M. Flesher taught UW’s first Internet-only distance course back in 1996. Then, in 2009, he helped found Saturday U, a program that takes UW professors out into the state to give free talks and discussions. Flesher still directs the program today—a program that has now touched hundreds of residents.
“I thought it was important to get the faculty out into the state so that people could see what excellent faculty members we have in a wide variety of subjects,” he says. “We can draw from all faculty members at UW, both in Laramie and at the Casper campus. We cover anything from wildlife to Shakespeare, to intellectual history, to art and music, to nursing and health.”
Saturday U is sponsored by the UW Outreach School, the Wyoming Humanities Council and the UW Foundation, joined by local supporters in each host city.
“At the moment, we go twice a year to Jackson, to Sheridan and to Gillette,” Flesher says. “It’s a Saturday morning event. I find three professors of various disciplines and subjects from UW (and sometimes community colleges), and I take them to one of our locations, and they each give a talk about an hour long. Then, over lunch, we have a roundtable discussion.
“We get very positive feedback from the people who come,” he says, adding that attendance varies from 35 to 130 people per event, with Jackson being the oldest and best-attended location.
Flesher says the attendees love the events and often gather around the professors to extend the conversation afterwards. “I can’t think of a single professor who hasn’t come back enthused about the response they got, about how the crowd reacted to them and about the interest they showed,” he says.
In addition to the live events, the lectures—nearly 100 to date—are available on YouTube and through the Saturday U website (uwyo.edu/saturdayu).
“I’m fortunate that I’ve made a career out of advocating for people who aren’t always the best suited to advocate on their own behalf—primarily women and children,” says Dona Playton, director of the Family and Child Legal Advocacy Clinic, formerly the Domestic Violence Clinic, which she co-founded in 2002. Over the years, the clinic changed names as it expanded the types of cases it takes. “We still prioritize clients who are low income victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking, but we also do guardian ad litem work, child welfare cases and private custody cases,” Playton says.
“We can take cases anywhere in the state. However, because of resources and the fact students need to be with a licensed faculty member, we share the state geographically with the Wyoming Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. We primarily take cases in the southeast corner up into the central-eastern part of the state. We try to do new case intakes every semester with inmates at the Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk, as well.
“We are one of the primary, direct legal service providers for low-income people in the state,” Playton says. “We pride ourselves on providing holistic legal services. A lot of times our clients need assistance in finding housing, getting certain benefits, finding affordable child care and in understanding what condition their credit is in. That’s a very valuable piece of what we do for the state. We try to help people become not only safe but self-sufficient.”
The clinic is also great hands-on training for Wyoming’s next generation of lawyers. “I love working with the students,” Playton says. “They become very invested in their clients’ cases. If we have a trial, it’s all hands on deck. We practice all aspects of the trial or hearing beforehand. It’s a supportive learning environment, and the experiential part of it is great because we’re helping real people with real legal issues.
“We handle about 30 cases at a time,” Playton says, adding that there’s always a great demand for their services. For Playton, it’s an ongoing labor of love. “I work year-round,” she says. “My cases don’t go away over the summer or Christmas break. I work directing the students in the clinic, and I teach courses each semester. I think it’s a great experience for the students and the clients we help. For a lot of our clients, if we didn’t help them, they would be forced to proceed on their own behalf or not at all. In addition, we have turned out some fantastic lawyers from the clinical programs at the law school.”
“If I had to encapsulate my research program over the last several years into one thought, it would be that we really try to repair damaged rangelands,” says Brian Mealor, associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and director of the UW Sheridan Research and Extension Center. While Mealor joined UW in 2009, his roles have evolved from weed extension specialist to director of the Sheridan center, all the while carrying on his research into non-native invasive weeds.
“I think that oftentimes when people think about weed management and invasive species management, they see it as sort of an agricultural problem,” Mealor says. “But with the kind of weed species I deal with, it’s much more than that. In rangeland, natural habitats and national parks, it becomes more of an issue related to things like wildlife habitat and ecosystem functioning—in some cases, maybe even public safety. Somewhere around 9.4 million acres have burned in the United States this year (as of October 2015), and a lot of those wildfires are driven by non-native invasive plant species.
“Some estimates have put it in the hundreds of millions if not over a billion dollars in economic impact per year related to invasive species as a whole,” he says.
Mealor and his team look at the causes for invasive plants in an area and tactics to reduce their impact. “Basically, we try to get rid of the bad guys and improve the good guys,” he says. This may involve grazing management, herbicides and other approaches, depending on the situation.
Mealor also looks at how to prevent non-native invasive species from being introduced in the first place.
“We’re trying to be proactive in the way we approach restoration and invasive weed management,” he says. “Oftentimes it seems that land managers at the large scale don’t take action until the problem is so bad it’s started to have really big impacts. We’re trying to identify some management thresholds for a subset of important weeds.”
Mealor feels fortunate to work in Wyoming, where agencies are cooperative and supportive: “If you’re a weed scientist who likes to work in rangeland ecosystems, there is no better place than the state of Wyoming to do that work. Folks are really supportive of improving habitat through doing invasive weed research and management. It’s really nice to have that kind of cooperation from people out in the state.”
Together with Trina Spencer at Northern Arizona University, Douglas Petersen, UW associate professor in the Division of Communication Disorders, has pioneered groundbreaking assessments and interventions for preschool and school-age children that accurately identify reading and language difficulty, and improve reading comprehension, language, writing and more.
“Language is the foundation for academic success,” Petersen says.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that about 80 percent of Native American, African-American and Latino children read below grade level, he says, noting that around 50 percent of Caucasian children also read below grade level.
The issue is typically not with decoding but with comprehension, Petersen says. “Most of the schools in our country have an assessment and instructional focus on decoding, or being able to read words on a page. However, being able to read something fluently is not the same thing as being able to understand it. My research has been all about investigating ways to efficiently and validly assess reading and language, develop less biased decoding and language dynamic assessments, and to implement multi-tiered systems of language support.
“The intervention we have developed—Story Champs—is based on the cumulative evidence that indicates that when children are asked to listen to complex language embedded in narration and practice producing that complex language, academically relevant language production and comprehension are facilitated.”
His research has resulted in a dynamic assessment of decoding and language—called the Predictive Early Assessment of Reading and Language (PEARL)—and benchmark and progress monitoring tools for decoding and language (the CUBED) that greatly reduce cultural and linguistic biases, predict future reading and language difficulty and inform instruction.
“Our assessments and interventions not only improve oral language comprehension and expression but also greatly improve reading comprehension and writing,” Petersen says.
Through collaboration with UW Associate Professor Roger Steeve and teachers and administrators, Story Champs, the PEARL and the CUBED are being used in Albany County School District #1, as well as school districts across the state, including on the Wind River Indian Reservation. “We started the Story Champs language intervention with the second-graders there,” Petersen says. “Even though the intervention has an oral language focus, second-graders, after just a few months of narrative intervention, produced writing that was stronger and more complex than the fifth-graders in that school. That’s really just the beginning.
“The CUBED assessment, which is free, has been downloaded in every state across this country, and it’s been downloaded in 17 different countries,” Petersen says. “We talk about our research, and it catches on like wildfire because the need is so great.”
A $1.5 million U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences grant is helping Petersen and fellow researchers develop a dual-language preschool version of Story Champs.
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the U.S. solar industry grew 34 percent in 2014. Unfortunately, says Jon Gardzelewski, assistant lecturer in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, solar panels are often an afterthought.
“We’ve seen so many examples of solar or net-zero houses where someone has taken a house that wasn’t really designed to fit the site or the climate, and then they throw on solar panels and call it a ‘green’ house,” he says. “Being architects and having a really serious appreciation for aesthetics, we are out to prove that if you’re considering solar panels and making your home a showcase zero-energy house, the home should celebrate that.”
Enter BERG—UW’s Building Energy Research Group. “We’d been approached by people around the state to look at ways they could save energy in their buildings,” says Gardzelewski, who heads the group. “That was a serious motivation for forming this group—we could tackle big projects, be organized and have access to more resources.”
The group also set about producing a catalog of Net-Zero Energy Homes for Wyoming. “The goal is to create home designs that can meet just about every need that we think people in Wyoming will have,” he says. “Our goal is to give the designs away, and then people can modify them to fit their lot and meet their needs.
“We developed a few models and started presenting them to builders, real estate people, solar people—everyone in the industry—to get feedback,” Gardzelewski says. “The designs are continually being revised to really try to get a perfect set of home plans for people in Wyoming that are going to be zero-energy, that are going to be affordable and that are architecturally competitive.”
While this is relatively uncharted territory in Wyoming, Gardzelewski says homes in Colorado with “green” features go for an added premium, and he believes this will be even more true when the homes are carefully designed to showcase these aspects and fit their environment.
In addition to the catalog, Gardzelewski and his colleagues help Wyoming residents and builders with projects on a regular basis and hope to strengthen outreach going forward. “Oftentimes through class or independent projects, we’ll set up a student with someone who has approached us,” he says. “They’ll work with the person and give them lots of design options. We teach our students how to use computer modeling and building information modeling, so people can get a really good visualization and understanding of a design.
“For people who have building needs, we are really excited to talk to them,” Gardzelewski says. “We’ll never compete with local professionals, but we recognize we can help with a lot of this detailed simulation work that local professionals just aren’t yet doing. We’re hoping to make stronger connections with the design teams in the state too.”
From Wyoming’s youngest population to its oldest, from medicine to education and architecture, UW’s professors make a difference every day in every corner of the state.