The University Record, April 17, 1995
Six U-M-Dearborn faculty honored
Six U-M-Dearborn faculty members were honored for their teaching, research and service at Honors Convocation ceremonies March 28.
English Prof. Claude Summers and Leslie Thornton II, assistant professor of education, received Distinguished Teaching Awards.
Distinguished Faculty Research Awards went to Sidney Bolkosky, professor of history; Julia Tai, professor of chemistry; and Dongming Zhao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Rosalyn Saltz, professor of education, won the Distinguished Faculty Service Award.
Summers was honored for his commitment to undergraduate education, with one student noting in his nomination that Summers “always manages to place a unique and challenging perspective on the material he teaches. He always attempts to show the various possible meanings of a work, never insisting on one dogmatic view.”
Over the past three and one-half years, Thornton’s courses in multicultural education have consistently earned high student ratings, with one of his nominators noting that he “has shown outstanding abilities as an educator and mentor in his patience and willingness to help students reach their goals.”
Since 1981, Bolosky’s research has focused on interviewing Holocaust survivors, resulting in a collection of some 185 audio interviews and 30 on videotape housed in the Mardigian Library.
He is a consultant for Steven Spielberg’s “Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project” and for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s oral history department.
Tai’s research focuses on computation chemistry, the calculation of physical and chemical properties of matter based on theory, and parallels the tremendous improvement in the technology available for complex computations.
Zhao has established research programs in image processing and machine vision. One of his research goals is to establish long-term and visible research collaborations with industry.
Saltz established and developed the Child Development Center, which has provided education to hundreds of children and is seen as a model innovative early childhood and teacher-training center.
