New Endowed Award Honors 12 Faculty from CAS, GSEC, Law

This month, President Robin Holmes-Sulivan hosted an inaugural dinner to honor the first recipients of the Presidential Faculty Excellence Award, an award made possible by a generous donation from former Board Chair Stephanie Fowler.

“By recognizing faculty achievements with this award, we shine a spotlight on the amazing individuals at the heart of Lewis & Clark’s excellence,” said Life Trustee Stephanie Fowler MA ’97. “I hope this award inspires our community to continue to go above and beyond for our students. Thank you to all the awardees for the meaningful difference you make in students’ lives.”

Fowler’s donation, along with other philanthropic funds secured by the President, were placed into an endowment whose returns each year will be used for the awards. With the encouragement of the President, the Board of Trustees approved the use of these funds and the establishment of the award at its meeting last May. Over the summer, the President charged each Dean with creating criteria and a process to administer the awards in their respective schools.

“Congratulations to the recipients of this inaugural award,” President Robin Holmes-Sullivan said. “These faculty members exemplify excellence through their unique scholarship and their sustained dedication to enriching the student-learning experience.”

College of Arts and Sciences

Dean of the College Bruce Suttmeier and the CAS Faculty Council created these award guidelines with the intent to balance a broad recognition of merit (rewarding as many colleagues as possible).

CAS Awardees

Professor of Biology Greta Binford

Greta Binford, named the 2011 Oregon Professor of the Year, is an expert on evolution and diversity of venomous spiders. Binford’s research program uses integrative, evolutionary approaches to better understand patterns of diversity in spider venoms. In her lab, students participate in evolutionary analyses of spider venoms at all levels of the process. This includes collecting a range of spiders in the field, doing protein analyses of the venoms, and using molecular approaches to study the genes that code for the venom proteins. We also are studying the evolutionary history of the spiders themselves to create a framework we can use to analyze venom evolution. Students also analyze the effects of venoms on insect prey and observe spider foraging behavior. These data help to better understand the role venom plays in immobilizing prey and how that varies across spider species.

Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies, Department Chair, Director of General Education Kundai Chirindo

Kundai Chirindo is a rhetorical scholar and teacher whose work focuses on how ideas of rhetoric relate to concepts of place and space. By thinking about how ideas of Africa are performed and staged in American public life, Chirindo, in his published scholarship, rethinks core concepts like rhetoric, space/place, sociolinguistics, epistemology, and the environment that are fundamental in Rhetorical Studies. He wrote a dissertation on the ideas of Africa that circulated around the emergence of Barack Obama under the direction of Dave Tell at the University of Kansas. Chirindo currently serves as the Director of General Education at Lewis & Clark, holds leadership positions in the Environmental Communication Division of the National Communication Society, and serves on the board of Solar Oregon.

Associate Professor of Theatre/Department Chair Rebecca Lingafelter

Rebecca Lingafelter teaches acting, directing, devised performance, voice and movement, global contemporary performance, and directs mainstage productions. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she studied with Anne Bogart, Andrei Serban and Kristin Linklater. In New York she performed at Classic Stage Company, PS122, The Ontological Hysteric Incubator, HERE Arts Center, The Bushwick Starr, The Chocolate Factory, Judson Church, Vortex Theatre Company, Target Margin Theatre, and The Metropolitan Opera. She has performed internationally in Korea, Germany, Italy, England and Budapest, Hungary. Lingafelter is a proud member of Actors Equity and SAG/AFTRA.

Associate Professor of Biology Margaret Metz

Margaret Metz is a plant community ecologist. She explores the relative importance of biotic interactions, disturbance, and the abiotic environment in driving dynamics. Metz and her students do field research on pathogens and natural regeneration in the old growth conifer forests of the Columbia River Gorge. She has ongoing research programs in both the coastal forests of the western US, where a recently introduced pathogen is transforming forest diversity, and in the tropical rainforests of eastern Ecuador, where she has a long-term project on the role of natural regeneration in the maintenance of the hyperdiversity in Amazonian forests.Metz has been awarded $47K in competitive research funding from the Population and Community Ecology Cluster program of the National Science Foundation. Her new DEB award is her sixth competitive NSF grant since 2014, following earlier support for her research in this forest disease system, as well as additional grants from NSF for her long-term research in the Amazonian forests of Ecuador and more recent work in the old growth conifer forests of southwestern Washington. All of Metz’s external funding has enabled Lewis & Clark students to actively engage in field research and data analysis.

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Director of Ethnic Studies Magalí Rabasa

Magalí Rabasa received her PhD from the University of California, Davis in Cultural Studies with an emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Her research and teaching focuses on networks of social movements and alternative media in the Americas, with a particular focus on the US, Mexico, and Argentina. At the Annual International and Multicultural Engagement Banquet, Rabasa was presented with the student-nominated 2022 Kristi Williams Staff and Faculty Award.Rabasa is the recipient of a 2019-21 Graves Award. This competitive award, offered biennially, recognizes excellence in teaching; the funding that accompanies it supports research-related expenses. Rabasa’s proposed research project, “Feminist Economies of Knowledge in the Americas” will extend her transnational research through an exploration of how the multimodal media produced by feminist actors in recent movements travels and circulates. This investigation and analysis will develop the concept of a feminist economy of knowledge, which refers to networks of knowledge production and reception grounded in ethics of collaboration, open inquiry, non-hierarchical organization, solidarity, and social justice.

Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies Mitch Reyes

Mitch Reyes has two primary research areas: the first examines the socio-political impact of science and mathematics. He is interested in how controversies get resolved in science as well as the ways mathematical discourse—for example, algorithms—influence contemporary culture. Reyes’ second area of research focuses on memory—specifically, the ways groups of people collectively remember their past. His research in this area examines the politics of public memory, the rhetorical strategies of remembrance, and the social consequences of collective memory practice.

Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies, SOAN Department Chair Sarah Warren

Sarah Warren earned her BA from the University of Arizona, MA from the University of Texas, Austin, and PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Her research has focused on questions of urban indigenous identity in Chile and Argentina. She is currently working on a project of short-term rentals and how cities are attempting to regulate them.

Graduate School of Education and Counseling

The dean will recommend faculty (generally two) to the president of the college to be considered for the Faculty Excellence Award. Both tenure-track and clinical faculty will be considered for the award. The recommendation will be based on a review of the previous year’s evaluation document(s) submitted by faculty. This includes, as appropriate for where each faculty member is in the evaluation cycle, the following: annual self-evaluations; peer Promotion and Tenure Committee evaluations; department chair evaluations; developmental reviews; reviews for promotion and/or tenure; and post-tenure reviews. Criteria for the award include both excellence across the range of faculty activity (teaching; scholarship; service; leadership; and other relevant activity) and excellence in one particular area that, by itself, makes an outstanding contribution to the Graduate School and to the Lewis & Clark Community.

GSEC Awardees

Associate Professor; Marriage, Couple, and Family Therapy Program Director Lana Kim

Lana Kim’s areas of expertise include: culture and cultural identity, gender, social constructionist and contextual approaches, couples therapy, and parent-child relationships. She is the 2019 recipient of the American Family Therapy Academy’s Early Career Award. Kim earned her PhD and MS degrees in MFT, with a concentration in Medical Family Therapy, from Loma Linda University and her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. In her clinical work, she draws from narrative approaches and socio-emotional relationship therapy, and is interested in the ways in which power, culture, and larger social contexts shape lived experience, relationships, problems, and the process of change in therapy. Her research interests include second generation Asian-American families, parent-child relationships, culturally responsive MFT practices, clinical supervision, and medical family therapy and collaborative care practices.

Clinical Assistant Professor; Program Director of Administrative Licensure; Co-Director of the Wallace Foundation Grant Megan Barrett

Megan Barrett is the program director for Administrative Licensure, and is also an instructor in the Principal Program, the Professional Administrator Program, and the Doctoral program. She has worked as both a teacher and a school administrator, and brings expertise on supporting and re-engaging students who have dropped out or have been pushed out of school. Barrett’s work focuses on school leadership practices that foster care, belonging, and well-being for students and staff, with a particular focus on recognizing and supporting students and staff who are traditionally marginalized in/by schools. Barrett also has additional expertise in equity-centered leadership preparation, program redesign, district-university partnerships, and best practices for developing pipelines and pathways to leadership and licensure. Her areas of expertise include: care and belonging in schools, equity and social justice, alternative education, educational administration and leadership, culturally responsive leadership, trauma-informed educational practices, collaborative leadership, school culture and climate, educator professional development, equity-centered leadership development, university-district partnerships, leadership pathways and pipelines.

Law School

Nominees will have made numerous contributions inside and outside the law school, and they have deep commitments to our students and to public service.

Law School Awardees

Professor of Lawyering Bill Chin

Bill Chin has served in the U.S. Air Force, Air Force Reserves, Oregon Air National Guard, and Oregon Army National Guard. He earned BS and MS degrees from Portland State University and his JD at Lewis & Clark Law School. Chin teaches Lawyering I and II, Race and the Law, and Military and Veterans Law. He has written 22 law review articles since joining the faculty. Chin served on the Dean Search Committee in 2023-24 and for the past two years he has also chaired the Lawyering Committee. For many years he has chaired the Academic Enhancement Admissions Committee and is also faculty advisor to the Minority Law Students Association and the Asian Pacific American Law Student Association. Chin was a member of the Executive Committee for the Minority Groups Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and the Award Committee for the AALS Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research. For several years, he served on the planning committee of the Asian American Youth Leadership Conference. He was also a Commissioner on the Oregon Commission on Asian Affairs and was chair of the Oregon State Bar’s Legal Heritage Interest Group. Chin is a member of the Legal Writing Institute and Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon serving on various committees. He has also served as co-chair of the Oregon Minority Lawyers Association, a member of the Oregon State Bar’s Uniform Criminal Jury Instructions Committee, a delegate to the Oregon State Bar’s House of Delegates, and vice-president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (Portland Lodge).

Professor of Lawyering and Director, Criminal Justice Reform Clinic Aliza Kaplan

Aliza Kaplan earned her BA from George Washington University and her JD from Northeastern University School of Law. She practiced law and then taught at Brooklyn Law School before coming to Lewis & Clark in 2011. Kaplan teaches Lawyering I and II and supervises students in the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic. She has also taught classes on Public Interest Lawyering and Wrongful Convictions. She won the 2015 Leo Levenson Award for Excellence in Teaching. Kaplan has chaired the law school’s Criminal Law Committee numerous times and has served on the Admissions, Curriculum, Employment, and Equity and Inclusion Committees. She is a faculty advisor to the Public Interest Law Project and the Loan Repayment Assistance Committee. She has written or co-authored more than 15 publications. Her work has had an enormous impact on law and policy. For example, her work on clemency resulted in numerous commutations of sentences in Oregon, and her successful writing and advocacy against non-unanimous criminal juries culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana. Kaplan also serves as counsel to the Forensic Justice Project, helped create the Community Law Division at Metropolitan Public Defender, and co-founded the Oregon Innocence Project. In 2022, Kaplan received the Hans Linde Award from the American Constitution Society (Oregon Lawyer Chapter), the President’s Award from the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, and Juneteenth Freedom Award from Uhura Sasa at the Oregon State Penitentiary on behalf of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic. In 2021, Kaplan received the Oregon State Bar Award of Merit, the Bar’s highest honor.