FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact: Kristin Sullivan, (817) 272-2761, kristinsul@uta.edu

ARLINGTON - ARLINGTON - Four UT Arlington faculty members will be honored Oct. 9 as recipients of the Alicia Wilkerson Smotherman Faculty Awards for their recent work with university students.

The Smotherman Faculty Awards, established in 2007 by Thad and Alicia Smotherman, recognize faculty within the College of Liberal Arts whose expertise and teaching abilities have inspired students to create work of exceptional merit. The awards were created to connect outstanding research and teaching and to showcase the achievements of university professors, said Beth Wright, dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

This year's honorees are:

• Natalie Gaupp, senior Lecturer in the Theatre Arts department, recognized for her work with an undergraduate student whose play was competitively chosen to be produced by a professional Equity theater. Gaupp served as the play's director.

• Seiji Ikeda, assistant professor of art, who worked with a graduate student on a project on visual communication in interactive gesture. The project incorporated a web camera and computer software and was given national exposure as a major presentation at the New Media Consortium annual meeting this summer.

• Gerald Saxon, dean of UT Arlington Libraries and associate professor of history, guided a blind graduate student's oral history project relating to interviews with a Gulf War veteran that resulted in a 75-page seminar paper incorporating social history into military history.

• Jason Shelton, assistant professor of sociology, mentored an undergraduate student and his McNair research project on race and perceptions of poverty during the summer, including a survey of 400 UT Arlington students.

To learn more about UT Arlington's College of Liberal Arts, visit http://www.uta.edu/libarts/.

The University of Texas at Arlington is a comprehensive institution of higher education in the heart of North Texas. The 2010 Smotherman Award winners are representative of the high-quality faculty who are improving educational opportunities for the nearly 33,000 students enrolled at UT Arlington this fall.

For more about UT Arlington, visit www.uta.edu.

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