2024 Bednarz Award Recipient

Hannah Bowling

Doctoral Student

Department of English

Biography: Hannah Elizabeth Bowling is an alumna of Abilene Christian University (ACU) and doctoral candidate and instructor of record in Texas A&M University's English department. Her dissertation examines African diasporic and continental adaptations of Shakespeare as articulations of the Black experience. Through development of the genre-race paradigm, she employs historical, cultural, performance-based, and textual methodologies to read the dramatic, cinematic, and narrative works of Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Joe de Graft, Shakirah Bourne, Caryl Philips, Margo J Hendricks, and others. Through a focus on genre, “‘So base a hue? A beauteous blossom, sure’: Race & Identity in Shakespearean Performance from the Early Modern to the Postmodern” she engages with Black storytelling as community-building, -sustaining, and -withholding praxis. 

She has presented at major national and international conferences such as the Global Digital Humanities (DH) Symposium, the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS), and the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Conference (MELUS). Sponsors of her work include the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR), the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI), the Aggie Research Program (ARP), and the Center for Integrated Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). At this time, she and her interdisciplinary team of student researchers are preparing for the publication of the digital project that accompanies her dissertation: Blackspeare. This DH project collates educational material for early-career scholars invested in teaching Shakespeare and his afterlives through a premodern critical race theoretical framework in the format of an open-access educational resource (OER). 

2023 Bednarz Award Recipient

Kameron Eves

Doctoral Student

       Department of Aerospace Engineering

Biography: Kameron Eves recently completed his Doctoral program in aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University. He graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering. 

During his Doctoral program, Kameron participated in several CIRTL programs including the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and the Teaching as Research (TAR) program. Kameron’s TAR research project sought to increase classroom participation by studying how a question’s phraseology influences students’ participation. In general, his research interests are aerospace dynamics, controls (particularly theoretical nonlinear controls), and undergraduate engineering education. After graduation, Kameron will join Utah Tech University in southern Utah as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. With the knowledge and experiences, he gained through the CIRTL programs, Kameron is eager to apply his learnings in this new role and contribute to the teaching research literature.

2023 Bednarz Award Recipient

Jean Parrella

Doctoral Student

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education & Communications

Biography: Jean Parrella is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications. Through her research, Parrella investigates how strategic messaging influences consumers’ food choice behaviors. She also investigates effective ways of improving the communication and public outreach skills of stakeholders across agricultural, food, and environmental sciences. 

During her doctoral program, Parrella actively participated in CIRTL@TAMU local programs and earned the Associate, Practitioner, and Scholar Certificates, which she believes contributed tremendously to her development as a scholar and educator. The study she conducted as a 2021–2022 Teaching-As-Research (TAR) Fellow, titled “Improvisation for agricultural communicators: Investigating the effect of paired role-play discussions on students’ empathy development using a quasi-experiment” was published in the Journal of Applied Communications. Parrella was honored to receive the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Dean’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Graduate Research in 2021 and the Gamma Sigma Delta Outstanding Doctoral Student Award for her department ALEC in 2023.

Graduating May 2023, Parrella will join Virginia Tech’s Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education as an assistant professor of Life sciences Communication. 

2022 Bednarz Award Recipient

Mi Sun An

Doctoral Student

Department of Construction Science

Biography: Mi Sun received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Architectural Engineering from the Chonbuk National University, South Korea, and another Master’s in Teaching & Learning (TESOL) from New York University, and she is now pursuing a Ph.D., in Construction Science at Texas A&M University. She also holds a 20 years’ experience in the construction industry. While in the industry, she worked for constructing schools, residentials, and parks. The most recent project that she worked for was to develop a 19-story residential and office building the gross area of which is 34,427 square meters.
 
While working in the industry, Mi Sun pursued efficiency in construction management which suits in information age. Her research interests include Construction Digital Twin, IoT for real-time construction visualization, Artificial Intelligence in construction operation optimization and Big Data Analytics in Construction Economy. After completing her Ph.D., she hopes to pursue a career as a researcher disseminating methodologies on information technology integration into construction industry.

2021 Bednarz Award Recipient

Montana Etten-Bohm

Doctoral Student

Department of Atmospheric Sciences

Biography: Montana is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University and has a passion for undergraduate education, specifically in the field of meteorology. Because of this passion and desire to learn more about the field of education, Montana has been heavily involved in CIRTL programs. She has completed the Academy of Future Faculty and the Teaching-As-Research programs, as wells as the CIRTL Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Local Learning Community and the College Classroom Teaching course. Through completion of these courses and programs, Montana has earned the CIRTL Associate, Practitioner, and Scholar certificates. Within her department, Montana has also been heavily involved in teaching, assisting as both a Teaching Assistant and Graduate Assistant Lecturer, and was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in December of 2020. After completing her Ph.D., she hopes to pursue a career as an instructional professor in atmospheric sciences to help address the lack of educational research in the meteorology field.

2020 Bednarz Award Recipient

Jaskirat Singh Batra

Doctoral Student

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Biography: Jaskirat Singh Batra is a doctoral candidate in Materials Science and Engineering department. He is actively involved in research (both disciplinary and engineering education), teaching and mentoring. His disciplinary research in developing ‘soft material-based’ medical technologies crosses the disciplines of materials, engineering and life science. In his engineering education research, Jaskirat has investigated the use Virtual Reality-based instruction and its’ impact on student motivation to learn complex 3D concepts in materials science. Jaskirat Singh Batra is a graduate of the Academy for Future Faculty and Teaching-as-Research Fellows programs, and he was selected through a competitive selection process to be a Graduate Teaching Fellow (instructor) in the College of Engineering in 2018-2019. Prior to that, Jaskirat has gained a lot of teaching experience being a Research Mentor for a research-based lab course and a Teaching Assistant for several classroom-based undergraduate courses. He wants to utilize his diverse teaching and research experience to promote the use of evidence-based educational technology in training STEM students.