Office of Faculty Development

Faculty development at Westminster College is an ongoing process to keep the faculty at their best in their teaching, scholarship, and the necessary intersection of those two activities. Faculty development activities include:

The weekly Faires Faculty Forum where faculty members present their recent scholarship.
Small group training sessions on current topics in technology, teaching, and scholarship.
Formal development seminars for new faculty members and for all faculty members.
Support for faculty scholarship in the forms of conference funding, research grants, and faculty development grants.
Peer review of faculty writing through the faculty writing center
Sabbatical proposal preparation and review.
Consultation on internal award and external grant applications.
Classroom observation
Individual consultation on any faculty development issue

Other Westminster College Faculty Development Awards

WATTO AWARDS: The Watto awards were endowed by Ruth and George Watto, to encourage continued faculty scholarship and research. This year’s recipients are:

Dr. Russell Martin, Professor of History, to support original archival research in St. Petersburg and Moscow on the topic of his next book which explores the law of succession to the Russian throne since 1797.

Dr. Thomas Oberst, Associate Professor of Physics, for his research in astrophysics. Tom has discovered more than a twenty exoplanets, the nature of which are detailed in several, peer-reviewed publications.

Dr. Diana Ortiz, Assistant Professor of Biology to study host feeding preferences of mosquito species collected at the Lomas Barbudal Biological Preserve, Costa Rica.

McCANDLESS AWARD: The McCandless award was endowed by the estate of J. Bardarah McCandless, Professor of Religion, 1961-1994, to support faculty scholarship. This year’s recipient was Dr. Sherri Pataki, Associate Professor of Psychology. Pataki will continue her collaborative research with Randa Abbas, Dean of Academic Affairs at the Arab Academic College in Haifa and Education professor at Western Galilee College in Akko, Israel. Their research examines stereotypes of the "other" between American and Arab populations in the Middle East, as well as cross-cultural understanding between American and Israeli Arab and Druze women.

HOON AWARDS: The Hoon awards were endowed by the estate of Dr. William Legrand Hoon, who graduated from Westminster College in 1937 with a degree in chemistry. The award is intended to encourage scholarly activity. This year’s recipients were Peggy Cox, Professor of Art; and Dr. Deanne Buffalari Tennant, Assistant Professor of Psychology. Thanks to the Hoon Award, Cox was able to attend a week long class at Shakerag Workshops in Sewanee, TN. At the workshop, Cox learned various processes of painting and printing with natural dyes made from plant and insect extracts— which she will use in her class called Wild Colors. Buffalari will continue her work in neuroscience.