The Chellgren Endowed Professorships
The Chellgren Center endowment will initially fund several named professorships. These academic-year positions are filled for three-year, non-renewable terms. The Chellgren Professors are University of Kentucky faculty members who are outstanding teachers and researchers, each with a compelling interest in undergraduate innovation and excellence. To be named a Chellgren Endowed Professor, a faculty member must propose a specific innovative project aligned with the mission of the Chellgren Center that will be the focus of the professor's scholarly agenda during his or her tenure as a Chellgren Professor. Proposals for projects from collaborative teams of professors will be considered.
Endowed Professor Bio's
Joanna M. Badagliacco
Professor Badagliacco is an associate professor of Sociology and Endowed Professor in the Chellgren Center. Her research and publications focus on housing distress among the poorest families in KY, including rural families; reproduction and fertility; Supplemental Security Income (SSI) among children; and the sociological implications of genomic research. She is currently the Director of the Discovery Seminar Program, a key program in the Chellgren Center for Undergraduate Excellence. Her teaching includes teaching in DSP, introducing students to sociology through the study of family poverty in KY, and recently offering a DSP seminar on regulating sex and gender in the U.S. She regularly teaches undergraduate methods (Social Research Methods I), the Sociology of Family, and a graduate seminar with topics of inequality on the Social Construction of Motherhood and Reproduction. Dr. Badagliacco is a Fulbright Senior Specialist, and the Chair of the Appalachian Center/University of Rome Scholar Exchange Program. Dr. Badagliacco won the Sarah Bennett Holmes award in 2006 and the Provost's Outstanding Teacher Award in 2001. She is socially active on many fronts including family planning. As an avocation, Dr. Badagliacco is a certified Master Gardener for the State of Kentucky, writes a regular column for the Agricultural Extension Office Master Gardener newsletter, and reviews gardening books for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Jonathan Golding
Jonathan Golding, professor in the Department of Psychology, has been a member of the UK faculty since 1988. A specialist in memory processes (most notably intentional forgetting) and in psychology and law (most notably jury decision-making), he has been the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including two Provost Outstanding Teacher Awards. He has also been involved in several innovative teaching initiatives at UK, ranging from the Modern Studies curriculum to the Social-Science Honors track. During his tenure as a Chellgren Professor, Golding proposes to incorporate a variety of inquiry-based learning techniques into a large-enrollment social-science course, to assess the efficacy of those techniques, and to broker discussions with other UK instructors about how best to incorporate such techniques into a variety of large-enrollment course settings.
William Rayens
Bill Rayens, professor in the Department of Statistics, joined the university in 1986. His research program focuses on the development and deployment of "structure seeking" multivariate paradigms (e.g., partial least squares), and he is a past recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. He has served on a broad range of education reform committees at UK and chaired the recent External Review Committee. As a Chellgren professor, Rayens proposes to assess the relative effectiveness of electronic versus concrete manipulatives in facilitating student learning in the general-education statistics classroom. He will conduct his experiment through large-enrollment sections of the Statistics 200 course, and his results should significantly inform the ongoing discussion of how best to promote statistical reasoning within the general-education curriculum.
Ernie J. Yanarella
Ernie Yanarella is professor of political science and Endowed Professor at the Chellgren Center for Excellence. He also serves as: Faculty Trustee, UK Board of Trustees; Director, Environmental Studies Minor program, College of Arts and Sciences; and Co-director, Center for Sustainable Cities.
He received his undergraduate degree in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University (1966, magna cum laude) and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1971). His wide-ranging research and teaching interests include: modern and contemporary political theory; critical policy studies (sustainability, energy and environment, war and peace studies); and politics and literature. His nine books and many dozen articles span these research areas.
In addition to being an inveterate science fiction reader, he collects World War I lead soldiers and Duke Snider and Brooklyn Dodger baseball cards. He is a frequent op/ed columnist on community issues and debates. He sometimes takes up accordion playing from his youth, but does so only for his own entertainment and before non-existent audiences.