Two professors win Trustee Teaching Excellence Awards

Professor of Psychology Michael P. Levine and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Judy A. Holdener received Trustee Teaching Excellence Awards at Kenyon's Honors Day Convocation in April.

Students and faculty praised Levine for his "meticulously crafted lectures, legendary humor, and unbounded enthusiasm for teaching." Holdener was recognized for her "excellent teaching, characterized by a creative and interactive teaching style," as well as her scholarship on pedagogy and on theoretical and applied mathematics.

Established in 1999 by the Board of Trustees, the awards go each year to one tenured faculty member who has been teaching at the College for ten or more years and one tenured or tenure-track faculty member who has been teaching at Kenyon for fewer than ten years. Both professors were awarded $15,000 for their "exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship."

Levine joined Kenyon's faculty in 1979 and teaches courses in abnormal psychology, theories of personality, clinical psychology, introductory psychology, and childhood psychopathology.

He has a special interest in eating disorders, particularly with regard to preventive education, developmental psychology, and community psychology. Levine has been instrumental in raising awareness of these issues. In the early 1980s, he initiated the country's first Eating Disorders Awareness Week with Kenyon's physician, Tracy Schermer.

Levine has involved students as collaborators in research projects, offering them the chance to get hands-on experience and to develop working relationships with faculty members.

"It gives the students a sense of psychology as it exists outside of books and the classroom, as well as a view of professors as people who made choices in their own lives," Levine said.

Holdener, an expert in algebraic K-theory, earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois. Her recent research publications deal with perfect numbers and number theory.

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