Five Women in Higher Education Chosen for Notable Honors

Julie Smart, professor of special education and rehabilitation at Utah State University, received the 2016 Distinguished Career in Rehabilitation Education Award from the National Council on Rehabilitation Education. Professor Smart joined the faculty at Utah State in 1992.

Dr. Smart holds bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Utah. She earned a Ph.D. in rehabilitation counseling from the University of Northern Colorado.

Maria C. Papadakis, a professor of integrated science and technology at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, is sharing with her two co-authors the 2016 Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association. She is the co-author of Engineering Applications in Sustainable Design and Development (CL Engineering, 2015).

Professor Papadakis holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University.

Amy Ratto Parks, the assistant director of composition in the department of English at the University of Montana, was awarded first place in the 2016 Phi Beta Kappa Arts & Sciences Poetry Contest. The society asked poets to submit works that reflected a favorite discipline in the liberal arts and sciences. Parks chose a middle school Latin lesson for the backdrop of her poem “Verb of Being.”

Parks is a graduate of Miami University in Ohio. She holds a master’s degree in literature and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Montana. She is currently studying for an educational doctorate at the university.

Joy Williams, the Eminent Writer-in-Residence in the creative writing program at the University of Wyoming, has been selected to receive the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story from the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She will read from her work and receive the $5,000 prize at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

Williams is a graduate of Marietta College in Ohio. She holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa.

Megan S. Ballard, a research associate at the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin, has been chosen as the winner of the R. Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America. Dr. Ballard will be honored at the society’s meeting in Salt Lake City later this month for her work in acoustical oceanography.

Dr. Ballard earned a Ph.D. in acoustics at Pennsylvania State University.