University Distinguished Faculty Awards

LSU was selected as an Institute Partner for the 2024 Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. The Fellows engaged with Louisianians to establish meaningful professional networks in the state. During their recent trip to New Orleans, Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, PhD, a professor at the School of Education, hosted them at her home for a fish fry.

The LSU Writing Project held its first place-based Invitational Summer Institute on Mallard Island in the Rainy Lake Watershed, north of International Falls, Minnesota. Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, PhD, director of the LSU Writing Project, received a grant from the Ernest Oberholtzer Foundation to host the week-long writing institute.

Cynthia DiCarlo, PhD was awarded the 2024 National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators (NAECTE) Foundation Established Career Early Teacher Educator Research Grant Award Winner. Dr. DiCarlo was selected as the top-scoring application after the review by a team of NAECTE peer reviewers for her project "Child Sustained Attention in One-Year-Olds." This project is part of a research series that has focused on identifying which teaching conditions (child choice, adult choice, or adult presentation) that elicit increased levels of engagement based on child age. Previous research on four-year-olds, three-year-olds, and two-year-olds has noted distinct differences in child attention based on teaching conditions. The goal of this project is to help provide direction to practitioners on the best teaching conditions to use with children at different ages to increase children's attention and engagement with materials. DiCarlo will be recognized at the National NAECTE conference on November 6 in Anaheim, California.

Early Childhood Education Institute (ECEI) Researchers, Michelle Brunson, PhD and Cynthia DiCarlo, PhD, along with their colleagues Ashely Boudreaux, Debra Jo Hailey, and Katrina Jordan, recently shared strategies for involving families in early childhood education in their article, "Engaging Parents as Partners Using Traditional and Distance Learning Models" in the practitioner publication ChildCare Exchange.

To secure funding to build the early care and education pipeline, the LSU Early Childhood Education Institute (ECEI) and the Louisiana Board of Regents collaborated on a submission to the Louisiana Workforce Commission to develop a path for those interested in pursuing a career in early care and education - the Registered Apprenticeship for Early Care and Education Teachers. This initiative will provide funding to those interested in working in the field but who are not yet working in an early care and education program. This funding will parallel the funding available to those currently working in Type 3 childcare centers through the Louisiana Department of Education's LA Pathways scholarship fund.

Tracey Rizzuto, professor in the School of Leadership & Human Resource Development, is LSU PI, and Christiane Spitzmüeller, professor at UC Merced, is the lead investigator for the $4.5 million NSF grant that will create a Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement.

School of Kinesiology Director and Karen Wax Schmitt and Family Endowed Professor John Nauright presented and led the feature session on The Enhanced Games at the International Network of Doping Research Conference on August 15-16. The theme of the conference was "Pushing Boundaries in Enhancement." He presented his work Beyond Scapegoats: Money, Doping and the Myth of the Level Playing Field in Sports, which explored the cases of Romanian gymnast Andrea Raducan, Russian ice skater Kamila Valieva, and recent discussions about Chinese swimmers.

The LSU community mourns the loss of its distinguished colleague, Yejun Wu, PhD. After a long illness, Dr. Wu entered hospice care in mid-June and passed away on June 30. He was 56 years old.

At the center of the Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education is the desire to prepare LSU students to educate the young minds of Louisiana to ensure their future successes. Joshua Ellis, PhD, Associate Professor of Science/STEM Education in the Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education, is a member of an LSU faculty team that has been awarded a $1,187,387 grant from the National Science Foundation for the preparation of future STEM teachers.