BRITTANY YEAROUT
Assistant News Editor
Baylor University announced Wednesday that Pepperdine biology professor Stephen Davis has received its distinguished 2008 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching.
The Cherry Award is the only national teaching award for college professors and has the single largest monetary reward of $200,000. Along with the stipend, the Pepperdine Natural Science Division will receive $25,000 when Davis goes to teach at Baylor for the fall semester.
“I think what is gratifying in all of this is the type of teaching that I have done and really focused on is to be professionally involved myself, to be involved in research and most importantly to share my research with my students,” Davis said. “And actually to facilitate, promote and encourage students while they are still young, while they are still undergraduates, to do scholarship.”
Davis has been at Pepperdine since 1974 and has taught numerous classes in biology. He is known for his ability to do his own research at the same time as being a good teacher, blending the two. Other professors often find it difficult to balance the two because of time restraints, said provost Darryl Tippens.
“There is really no award in the field of teaching like this, if there was a Pulitzer Prize or Nobel in teaching this would be it, there is nothing quite like it,” Tippens said. “And I think he was the ideal candidate because he brings together so many of the qualities or virtues of a great teacher.”
Biology professor and Assistant Dean for Research Dr. Lee Kats has been a colleague and friend of Davis for more than 18 years. Kats said Davis’ vibrant attitude has added to his incredible reputation as a scientist and teacher.
“Boundless enthusiasm,” Kats said. “He is one of the most enthusiastic people I know when it comes to teaching, his students and science.”
The Cherry Award has been given every two years since 1991. Other professors who have won this award are from colleges such as Rice University, Brown University, Dartmouth College, New School for Social Research and University of Texas at Austin.
“It is a very impressive group of people he is joining, kind of an elite core,” Tippens said. “And, again, it speaks extraordinarily well of Steve but it also speaks well of Pepperdine, that we have provided a kind of community and culture where a great scholarly teacher can flourish.”
There were 120 applications for the Cherry Award and a committee of 12 faculty members from various disciplines across Baylor University who carefully selected Davis. Stephanie Fabritius, the vice president for academic affairs and the dean at Centre College, nominated Davis for the award. As his former student, she is involved with higher education because of the experience she had at Pepperdine and with Davis.
“Steve is just a transformational teacher,” Fabritius said. “One of my experiences with him was working in a salt marsh. That experience was life-changing. It made me decide what I wanted to do and he just got me really excited about science and biology.”
According to Fabritius, Davis is the perfect person for the award because of his love of biology, his love of teaching and the inspiration he has given to students.
“He had confidence in me where he gave me the space to be able to ask questions and see if I could answer questions,” Fabritius said. “Even though I was an undergraduate student I could know something about an organism that no one else knew.”
Senior Nicholas Rowan has taken numerous classes with Davis and said he not only considers him a great teacher but a great friend.
“I broke my eye sockets and my nose and Dr. Davis was one of my first visitors at the hospital,” Rowan said. “He is not only a great teacher but a great friend … What makes him a good teacher is that he incorporates anything that is new and current. He is so knowledgeable, Dr. Davis could probably teach any class he wanted too.”
The Robert Foster Cherry family made this endowment bequest to Baylor. Cherry had been a student and a teacher who wanted to reward, remember and bring in other great teachers, according to the chair of the Cherry Award selection committee, Heidi Hornik.
“Dr. Davis exemplifies undergrad teaching combined with shepherding undergrad research for the Robert Foster Cherry Award,” Hornik said.
Davis said some of the $200,000 will go to the undergraduate research program at Pepperdine. He is the coordinator of the Summer Undergraduate Research in Biology and has written grant proposals that have been funded to support undergraduate research.
Although Davis would not give specifics, he will be speaking about what he calls “investing in spice” on Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. in Smothers Theatre.
“I don’t want to divulge too much but it is a concept that I would like to present, reveal, and argue, and I may or may not convince the audience,” he said.
01-17-2008
