As the ASU Physical Therapy Department’s academic coordinator of clinical education, Lewis finds facilities where PT students get their hands-on training and prepares them for the experience.  She has secured more than 100 clinical contracts with health care facilities throughout the U.S., where ASU physical therapy students now have the option of doing their clinical rotations.  Several of the contracted facilities are on the U.S. News and World Report list of best hospitals, including Mayo Clinic, Texas Children’s Hospital and Methodist Hospital in Houston, and the Kessler Institute of Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J.

“I make sure that the sites are appropriate for our students,” Lewis said, “and that the sites have all the information they need in order to mentor our students well.  I also make sure the students are ready to go, including having all their records in place and having passed all their classes.  I also prepare them for those aspects of work in the clinic that are not directly related to patient care.”

That type of support for students led the ASU Alumni Association to name Lewis the first-ever Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award winner from the new College of Nursing and Allied Health in the fall of 2009.

But, it is not all about just helping the students.  Lewis also prepares the professional therapists who oversee the students in their clinical rotations.  In that capacity, she was appointed to the American Physical Therapy Association’s (APTA) Clinical Instruction Education Board (CIEB) for a three-year term in July of 2009.

The CIEB oversees the APTA Clinical Instructor Education and Credentialing Program (CIECP) and the advanced version of the program.  Lewis is a credentialed clinical trainer for both programs, one of only two in Texas for the regular CIECP and the only one in the state for the advanced program.  There are only 49 credentialed trainers for the advanced program in the entire U.S.

On top of all that, Lewis is also an assistant clinical professor in the ASU Physical Therapy Department, where she teaches classes in documentation, clinical practice and practical skills.

“I enjoy interacting with the students and finding ways to engage them in different topics,” Lewis said.  “But, in our new doctoral program, I will have fewer responsibilities in classroom teaching, though I will still teach my Introduction to Clinical Practice course and the documentation.”

Prior to her 10 years on the ASU faculty, Lewis spent nearly three decades as a licensed physical therapist in a variety of settings, including acute care, outpatient orthopedic physical therapy, nursing home, long-term acute care and home health.  She received her Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Baylor University and a certificate in physical therapy from University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.  She received her Master of Science degree in exercise and sports science with a minor in industrial engineering from Texas Tech University.

Lewis’ husband, Preston, is director of the ASU Office of Communications and Marketing.  Their son Scott Lewis, daughter-in-law Celeste and granddaughter Hannah live in Anchorage.  Their daughter Melissa Kemp, son-in-law John and granddaughter Cora reside in Round Rock.

Interested in a career in physical therapy?

The 2009 Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award recipient from the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, Olson has served as head of the Government Department since 1989, and he also helped develop ASU’s International Studies program.

“I was an original member of the ‘gang of eight’ that went to Lüneburg, Germany, to negotiate the exchange program in 1992,” Olson said.  “From 1993 through the summer of 2008, I directed or co-directed with Dr. Sharynn Tomlin some 13 study abroad programs in Lüneburg, Sheffield, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland, and in 2009, Italy/Greece.”

Olson has used his government expertise to direct such courses as Politics and Policy in the United Kingdom, Britain and the European Union, and The History of Freedom.

“I believe that international education has become critical to anyone claiming today to have a higher education,” Olson said.  “In our global community, it is imperative that our citizens develop an understanding and empathy for other cultures.  Study while traveling is essential in developing this empathy.”

Besides International Studies, Olson has a passion for government and has spent 31 years instructing young minds on the intricacies of the American political process.  Although he didn’t plan to stay 30 years when he came to ASU from the University of California-Davis, where he earned his doctorate and began his teaching career, it has certainly worked out.

“When I first came, I had never heard of San Angelo,” Olson said.  “I debated coming here, but I liked the people, the teaching orientation of the school and the camaraderie within the department.  My colleagues became my friends.”

The Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award isn’t a surprise to many of his former students, including Kelby Hagar, president and chief executive officer of Digital Witness, LLC, and a Harvard Law School graduate.

“I took a lot of classes from Dr. Olson,” Hagar said.  “He was always helpful and a good adviser.”

Olson’s teaching specialties include the American political process with particular emphasis on the American presidency, campaigns and elections, along with American political culture.   He also focuses on comparative politics, international relations and methodology, Texas politics and British politics.  He has published articles in American voting behavior, political culture and campaign finance.

Additionally, Olson serves on the ASU Honors Council, which he chaired from 2002-04 after leading the Honors Program Development Committee in 2001.  He also serves on the College of Liberal and Fine Arts Curriculum Committee, the International Studies Committee and the Teacher Education Council.

Olson’s reach extends beyond the academic world as he has served as a political or legislative adviser for 30 political candidates and officeholders, including federal district judge and former San Angelo State Rep. Rob Junell and former State Rep. Dick Burnett.

In the community, Olson has moderated political debates and sponsors the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.  He is a member of the Journal of Borderland Studies editorial board and previously served as co-editor of the Texas Journal of Political Studies.

Such hands-on participation shows Olsen’s passion for the political process, whether he is teaching from a lectern in an ASU classroom or co-directing a program in England or Scotland for his students.

Interested in a career in government?

Already the winner of ASU’s 2008 Teaching Excellence Award, Amos has also been named a Piper Distinguished Professor for 2009 by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation in recognition of her outstanding achievements in the teaching profession.

The Piper Foundation established the award in 1958 and Amos is just the ninth ASU professor to receive the honor.  In addition to being one of the top statewide honors for professors in higher education, the designation carries with it a $5,000 honorarium.

Though she originally planned a career in botany research, Amos decided to take the teaching route to have more contact with students.  Now, she has the best of both worlds.

“I really like the teaching portion of it and what is great about ASU is the opportunity that I have to work with students in research,” Amos said.  “In fact, the research that I do now, I could not do without their help.”

That research includes studies and surveys of plants native to the Chihuahuan Desert and Chisos Mountains regions of Big Bend National Park and is almost always aided by both graduate and undergraduate students.

“Being an ASU graduate, I appreciate what that opportunity meant to me when I was a student here,” Amos said.  “It really made a difference in my life.  It enriched not only my education, but helped me select a career.  So I wanted to come back and pay back that debt that I felt I owed this university.”

Upon her return, Amos was quickly named head of the Biology Department, a post she held for 13 years, but then vacated to free up more time for teaching and research.  She is also curator of the Angelo State Natural History Collections’ Herbarium, which contains over 60,000 plant specimens from Texas, the U.S. and around the world.

“It’s amazing,” Amos said.  “I think I could work in there even if it wasn’t part of my responsibilities.”

Amos credits an ASU plant taxonomy class for really opening her mind to a career in botany, but her love of nature goes all the way back to her childhood.

“My grandmother would walk me around their property, show me the wildflowers, tell me the names of them and tell me interesting things about them,” Amos said.  “My parents both loved the outdoors and my dad was an avid hunter and fisherman, so I was always outside with him.  I think that early introduction to nature made a big difference.”

Amos holds both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from ASU and her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma.  In her spare time she enjoys reading, attending sporting events, traveling, snorkeling and spending time with her family.  Her immediate family consists of four rescued dogs, Sugar, Dottie, Lucy and Rosy, who share her home near Dove Creek.

While she admits to occasionally wondering what her life would have been like had she gone into research instead of teaching, Amos has found a home at ASU.

“I have excellent colleagues,” she said.  “We all have the same objective and that is doing the best we can for our students.  That makes it a nice place to work.”

Interested in a career in biology?

“I think of the poem as a kind of interpretation of life, a lens through which you can focus life,” Ellery said.  “It’s a way of connecting both to myself and to whatever is not myself.  It’s a way of connecting to the deep currents of life, to the lives of others and to whatever life I’m living and hope to live.”

That philosophy serves the Texarkana native well in his writing and figures into his being named a member of the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL), a non-profit group that recognizes literary achievement and stimulates interest in Texas writers.

Ellery doesn’t adhere to strict guidelines in his writing, which makes for an eclectic body of work.

“I don’t like to put any kind of limit on what poetry is,” he said.  “I think there is some very fine fluid poetry, open-form poetry, what some people might call free verse.  There is no such thing as free verse. Whatever you do, you want to write well.”

As for formal poetry of others, Ellery is a fan.

“I’m reading the romantics again for a class I’m teaching,” he said.  “I love the blank verse of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and the quatrains of Tennyson’s In Memorium, so I think you can write great poetry in a lot of different ways.”

The form Ellery chooses for a poem is a matter of feeling for the subject matter.

“It’s kind of instinct to sense the form that would benefit it,” he said.  “Somehow, the poem dictates its form.”

“Whatever you want to call it, I don’t think anyone has ever explained creativity – where it comes from or how it works,” Ellery said.  “I’m just glad when it happens and there is kind of a joy to it.  Robert Frost uses a wonderful figure to describe this process: ‘Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.’”

Ellery sees creativity partly as a conscious choice of a particular word, sound or form, but at the same time, he believes that a lot of it is instinctive or intuitive.

“Letting the thing happen and develop where it wants to go – no surprise for the writer or the reader,” he said.  “You love those moments of surprise in the poem.”

Ellery is the third ASU professor to join the TIL, an exclusive group of literature advocates.   He follows fellow English professor Terrence Dalrymple and history professor Arnoldo DeLeón as members.

Among authors the TIL has honored are San Angelo Western novelist Elmer Kelton, Liz Carpenter, Gary Cartwright, former San Angeloan Mike Cox, Kinky Friedman, Skip Hollandsworth, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.

Ellery has been published in literary journals, including Cimarron Review, AVOCET and New Texas and authored two books of poetry, Quarry (Mountain Muse Press, 2005) and All This Light We Live In (Panther Creek Press, 2006).

He is also noted for translating other people’s works, including Whatever Happened to Antara, a collection of short stories by award-winning Syrian writer Walid Ikhlassi, published by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (University of Texas Press, 2004).

Ellery acquired his expertise about Syria while teaching American poetry at the University of Aleppo in Damascus, Syria, while on a Fulbright teaching grant.

“The Syrians have a deep respect for language,” Ellery said.  “Of course, it’s very challenging, but I enjoyed it a lot.  I was pretty provincial, so it was nice to get out of my comfort zone.”

Like in much of his work, Ellery found inspiration in his time in the Middle East and is working on a book of poems based on those experiences.  One of his poems, “Bimaristan Arghun,” won the 2005 Betsy Colquitt Award from the literary magazine, descant.

Looking back on his works, Ellery didn’t pinpoint one as his favorite.

“My favorite is always the poem I’m working on right now,” he said.  “I would be hard-pressed to select a favorite.  I kind of do it and get done with it.”

“To me, it’s more about the writing than it is about publishing it or sharing it or showing it to others.  I do have some poems that I like and that I think are pretty relevant.  They probably have something to offer to readers.”

Interested in a career in english?

On that path, he also found a natural career choice that led him to become an assistant professor of music at ASU.

“I grew up with music around me,” Bonenfant said.  “I didn’t understand why everybody in the world didn’t play music, because that was just the way I grew up.”

His dad was a drummer for the U.S. Naval Academy Band and his brother also took up the drums.  Bonenfant, who teaches single reeds at ASU, settled on the clarinet.  He developed a good foundation through studies with a couple of Navy musicians, and later, with his high school bands in Virginia and Maryland and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“I always knew that I was fairly good at playing,” he said.  “When I finally got to the point where there were people better than me, that’s when I had to really start working and not relying on whatever natural talent I may have had.”

At UNLV, Bonenfant worked his way into the university’s jazz ensemble.

“I played with a lot of different folks then, like Joe Williams, the former singer with the Count Basie Band, who lived in Las Vegas and performed with the band a lot,” Bonenfant said.  “I also played with Louie Bellson, who was a great drummer, and Don Menza, who played with a lot of bands, like Buddy Rich’s.”

“I also worked with a marching jazz band at Disneyland one summer while I was still attending UNLV,” Bonenfant said.  “They brought in folks like Bobby Shew and Gary Foster, some really heavyweight studio players, to work with the band a week at a time.”

Bonenfant moved to California in 1985 where he attended the California Institute of the Arts, working on a master’s degree and picking up some more musical experience.

Bonenfant moved back to Las Vegas as assistant to the conductor and as operations manager with the Las Vegas Symphony until it ceased operations due to financial difficulties.  He then began teaching at UNLV, first in jazz history and then rock history while playing with the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

Between playing with the Philharmonic and freelancing with orchestras put together for special events, Bonenfant performed with renowned Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti four times, Pavarotti’s countryman Andrea Bocelli, also a tenor, classical and pop singer Charlotte Church and Spanish tenor Placido Domingo.

At other times, Bonenfant expanded his musical horizons by playing with composer-pianist Marvin Hamlisch, Broadway star Tommy Tune, Peter Schickele (also known as PDQ Bach), the Village People and the Moody Blues.

He even played with one big name by chance.

“Dudley Moore (actor, noted pianist) was playing a fundraiser with the Las Vegas Symphony for the Nevada Ballet Theatre,” Bonenfant said.  “I ended up playing the big clarinet solo at the beginning of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ after my teacher, Felix Viscuglia, started to play and nothing came out of his horn.”

“A pad had fallen out, so he just turned to me and said, ‘here, play.’  So, on the spur of the moment, with no sleep the night before because I had been up all night copying music for another concert, I’m playing this solo,” Bonenfant said.  “Fortunately, it’s one of those solos that I really can play in my sleep.  Felix said, ‘OK, you did the rehearsal, so you should do the concert.’  So, I ended up playing with Dudley Moore.”

Bonenfant also crossed paths with some “names” from the music world after he arrived at ASU.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve played with contemporary Christian singer Sandi Patty and Monica Mancini (composer-conductor Henry Mancini’s daughter),” he said.

ASU came to Bonenfant’s attention as a possible employer while he was still writing his dissertation after his father sent him a list of eight places that had clarinet openings.

“I ended up getting the job I wanted and I’ve been here ever since,” Bonenfant said.  “Every year seems to have gotten better.  My colleagues are great.  It’s very rare when you run into a department where you get along with almost everybody.”

Interested in a career in music?

A native of West Texas, Engdahl grew up on a stock farm near Brady, where he still holds about 1,000 acres of farm and ranch land.  While his university education took him out of the area to Texas A&M, he came back as soon as he could, joining the ASU faculty in 1976 for his first job out of college.

“To me it was a nice challenge starting out,” Engdahl said.  “Back in the mid-70s, ASU was just getting cranked up as a four-year school.  We spent a lot of time getting the sheep and goat program going and that was a lot of fun.”

In light of his Aggie education, Engdahl took a big chance coming to Angelo State, passing up a job as a livestock specialist with the Texas A&M Extension Service to join ASU’s fledgling agriculture program.

“It was a lot more of a challenge to come to a new program and try to be a part of growing it into something that we could really be proud of,” Engdahl said.  “To me, it has been more fun to do that than to go to an established program.  We have as good a program as a lot of big schools.”

In addition to teaching classes, Engdahl has been head of the Agriculture Department since 1997.  During his tenure he also helped start the student Block and Bridle Club and was instrumental in the formation of the multi-award-winning student livestock judging and wool judging teams.

His office is literally crammed with awards for his service to FFA (Future Farmers of America), 4-H clubs, the Block and Bridle Club and the San Angelo Stock Show and Rodeo.  He also received the 2008 Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award for the College of Sciences from the ASU Alumni Association.

“When you have been with the school as long as I have, it is part of your life,” Engdahl said.  “To be honored for coming in and having fun for 30-plus years, maybe I should be giving someone else an award for allowing me to do that.”

One major factor that has kept Engdahl at ASU is the university’s Management, Instruction and Research (MIR) Center, more commonly known as the ASU Ranch.  Located off U.S. Highway 87 just north of San Angelo, the MIR Center includes 6,000 acres of farm and ranch land that is home to a multitude of wildlife, a herd of Angus cattle, Boer and Angora goats, and Rambouillet, Suffolk and “hair” sheep.  It also houses the Food Safety and Product Development Lab and ASU Meat Market.

“It is really a remarkable thing for a small school to have a facility like that,” Engdahl said.  “Most schools, even Division I schools, don’t have a ranch where students can go and get hands-on experience.  It really helps us build a solid program for our students.”

Getting to know students in ASU’s more intimate classroom and office settings is also something Engdahl has enjoyed over his many years at the university.

“Sometime I think you should have a degree in psychology for this job instead of animal science, though,” Engdahl said.  “I talk to students about boyfriend-girlfriend problems, school problems, financial problems and the list goes on.  You try to help them any way you can and I like that about ASU, because it is small enough to where we can still do a lot of interaction with the students.”

He also likes being close to his place in Brady, where he spends most of his spare time when he is not on a golf course somewhere.  But, regardless of how or why, Engdahl and ASU have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship that is now well into its fourth decade.

“I’ve had several land grant schools offer me jobs over the years,” Engdahl said.  “But, I just didn’t care to leave.  ASU is a good school and I’ve had a good run here.”

Interested in a career in agriculture?