MSU Awards Honor Engaged Scholarship

College of Arts and Letters
Alison Clare Dobbins

Alison Dobbins is the director and creator of Theatre Engine, an interdisciplinary project focused on exploring audience engagement in dance through the use of mobile applications. Collaborators are from three MSU colleges, Brigham Young University, University of Wisconsin– Green Bay, Colby College, University of Oregon, and St. Olaf College. Dobbins is also a coprincipal investigator on Dancing Computer, an interdisciplinary project focused on developing methods to teach dance and computer literacy to elementary school students, and creator of the Media Theatre Performance Laboratory, a partnership between MSU and Riverwalk Theatre to establish new methods of understanding, teaching, and developing media/theatre productions.

College of Communication Arts and Sciences
David Keith Poulson

David Poulson is the senior associate director of MSU's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, where he teaches environmental news reporting and organizes local to international workshops for students, journalists, and others. He also teaches scientists how to translate their research and make it relevant to the average person. Poulson created and built three Knight Center online environmental news services, including Great Lakes Echo, which regularly attracts hundreds of thousands of page views from across the world through its app, social media, and website. Under Poulson's supervision, students and professionals write podcasts, videos, and text stories that are reposted globally.

College of Human Medicine
Rae Lee Schnuth

Rae Schnuth has served as director of the Leadership in Medicine for the Underserved certificate program in the College of Human Medicine for over 10 years, mentoring hundreds of students engaging in structured, longitudinal, service-learning activities in the communities of Saginaw, Flint, and internationally across three continents. Her certificate students have served on one- and two-month-long rotations in Peru, Costa Rica, and Uganda. Service-learning partners include migrant clinics, public schools, health departments, and community organizations.

College of Law
Joshua Matthew Wease

Joshua Wease is the director of the Tax Clinic, which at any given time serves roughly 100-120 low-income clients in the Lansing area who are involved in a controversy with the IRS. The Clinic is staffed by second and third year law students. Under Wease's leadership, the clinic now provides services to more rural and small communities across Michigan and has redesigned its website, which has been translated into Spanish.

College of Music
Rodney T. Whitaker

Rodney Whitaker holds dear the unwritten directive of a true jazz musician as being a mentor to his students. In his first years at MSU, he began passing on the mentorship tradition with an outreach program to inner-city schools in Detroit and Lansing. These efforts have since grown into a Jazz Artist in Residence program supported by the MSU Federal Credit Union, where well-known jazz artists visit campus for a weeklong residency. Residency guests engage the campus community with public concerts and visits to local school systems, as well as tours across the state with Jazz Orchestra I.

College of Natural Science
Pavel Sikorskii

Pavel Sikorskii leads the effort to transform mathematics gateway courses at MSU with an overarching goal of improving student success and reducing time to degree. He is the principal investigator on a BOSCH Community Foundation grant that supports the BOSCH/MSU High School STEM Success program in Detroit area public schools, which combines online curriculum with in-person interactions to improve the college mathematics readiness of high school graduates.

College of Social Science
Joshua Sapotichne

Josh Sapotichne established and directs the InnovateGov service-learning program for the College of Social Science. The program provides assistance to the City of Detroit through student placements in key institutions. Students in the program also take a senior seminar course on urban public policy. In the first year, 10 students worked in the Detroit Mayor's Finance Office. In the second year, InnovateGov joined the Det × MSU initiative of the University. This summer the program is providing a service-learning opportunity for 50 students from all across the University, and its partnerships have expanded to include Wayne County and local nonprofits.

College of Veterinary Medicine
Daniel K. Langlois and John P. Buchweitz

Daniel Langlois treated animals suffering from lead toxicity in Flint and helped launch an investigation into screening for lead exposure. He held free public clinics at various locations to evaluate blood lead levels in dogs and developed information materials about lowering lead exposure, providing safe drinking water to pets, and signs of lead toxicity. He and his team spent numerous Saturdays holding lead screening clinics in the Flint area, evaluating dogs, interacting with residents, and answering their questions. The clinics were held in partnership with community organizations, churches, and the Humane Society of Genesee County. John Buchweitz is a toxicologist who worked closely with Langlois on the project.

James Madison College
Louise Ann Jezierski

Louise Jezierski teaches almost yearly courses on Detroit that bring students to the city and engage them in socially-significant civic activities. In the past few years, she has also developed courses on Lansing and Flint. Students spend time in both cities, visit with local municipal authorities, nonprofit organizations, and entrepreneurs, and then write research papers that, hopefully, will be of use to community stakeholders. Jezierski has also trained undergraduate students in how to gather and assess data in the community in order to examine the factors that contribute to the social capital that a neighborhood possesses.

Lyman Briggs College
Sara C. Fingal and Rebecca H. Lahr

Sara Fingal and Rebecca Lahr have incorporated water testing and research into graduate education and public outreach programs. Their project on understanding controversies related to children, environment, and scientific research probes how K-12 students learn about water and environmental sciences. By using commercial water testing kits, along with Lahr's newly developed drop evaporation analysis technique, area K-12 students have evaluated various chemical and particulate impurities in their community's water supply. Lahr's environmental engineering graduate students have been designing additional water tests, keeping in mind cost affordability for effective citizen science in underprivileged communities, while Fingal has been training them in strategies for public science communication.

Residential College in the Arts and Humanities
Kevin Lamont Brooks

Kevin Brooks has taken a leadership role in creating the new RCAH College Colloquium on difficult issues and served on the RCAH Civic Engagement Task Force. He has created new partnerships with the Lansing Art Gallery; the Grit, Glam, and Guts Summer Conferences in Lansing, Flint, and Detroit; Peace and Prosperity Youth Action in Lansing; the My Brother's Keeper program in Lansing and its statewide alliance; the Literacy Come to Life Program in Detroit; and the Ingham Community Health Improvement Plan Workgroup. He also has taught important civic engagement classes in RCAH, many of which involve these community partnerships.