President's Professors

Professor Adams believes that a successful undergraduate experience is tied to instruction that reaches far beyond the classroom. He is a professor of materials and the chair of the materials program in the School of for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Professor Adams is an excellent teacher who has taught a wide variety of courses, created several courses, and created teaching materials with national impact. He is consistently assigned some of the most difficult/least popular courses to teach, and he consistently turns them into the most popular courses in the curriculum. He is extremely dedicated to undergraduate success, including recruiting, advising, research, and job placement.

Blasingame’s areas of expertise are young adult literature, indigenous education, secondary writing instruction and the education of pre-service teachers, in addition to cowboy poetry.

Educators are most successful when we work with students long enough to get them to do what we do — but better. Whether students pursue work around issues related to my particular areas of specialty is unimportant. What is important is ensuring students know how to ask questions, contextualize issues, and access relevant and reliable information in order to inform their opinions and professional and academic work. I teach students, at all levels, how to navigate the process of becoming an academic and professional. This means helping students understand how to ask meaningful questions, locate those questions within a larger body of literature or contemporary ideas, and find ways to answer their questions.

Brownell’s research in biology education is internationally recognized. Starting from her education as a neuroscientist, she transitioned to discipline-based education research and is an expert on course-based undergraduate research experiences and making undergraduate science learning experiences, specifically active learning courses and undergraduate research experiences, more inclusive.

Cheong studies the complex interactions between communication technologies and different cultural communities around the world. She believes that invisible yet powerful cultural and communicative forces make up how we interact and organize with digital media, to impact participation and power in society.

Marshall uses the power of yeast genetics to study basic cellular biology and applied analysis for rational drug design. She is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors, for her intellectual property work in rexinoid synthesis and biology.

Professor Smith believes it is possible to change the world, and so do his undergraduate students. He is a professor of conservation biology, population biology and mammalogy in the School of Life Sciences, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has been the leader of the conservation biology program for over three decades and has successfully built the program based on his internationally recognized research, mentorship of graduate students, and through his dedicated support of undergraduate education. He worked to develop new courses, recruit new faculty and support staff to actively embrace undergraduate students and their goals. He has served as the Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Lagomorph Specialist Group and as an advisor to the Chinese government on issues concerning biodiversity. 

Wu is a professor in industrial engineering program in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence and the founding co-director of the ASU-Mayo Center for Innovative Imaging. Her main areas of interests are in health informatics, distributed decision support. She is National Science Foundation CAREER award winner.