Excellence in Teaching Award

The FCSM Excellence in Teaching Award recognizes faculty excellence in the classroom and the sustained positive influence of their teaching on students and advisees.

The recipient of this year’s award began his/her career at Towson University in 2007 as a lecturer.  Her rise in the ranks as a faculty member is a testimony to her commitment and continued development as a teacher and scholar.  Prior to joining TU, our recipient brought eight years of training and background as a research scientist in forensics from the United States Army.  Her invaluable departmental contribution includes the trace track in the forensic program both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Over the course of our recipient’s career at TU, she has taught 77 research students and designed and/or taught a total of 10 different courses.  She has excellent student evaluations and peer evaluations.  As forensic chemistry is comparatively a new field, not many textbooks focusing on this subject matter are available, so our recipient has had to develop her own teaching materials for these courses.  Most recently, our awardee implemented successfully a working model of a hybrid classroom to encompass the latest technologies available in the forensic field.  One of our awardee’s goals has been to provide hands-on experience to reinforce instructional material and to help the students to apply their classroom knowledge and skills to technologies required in the workforce.  As a testament that this teaching style and approach works very well, several students who have taken these courses, have landed employment in the forensics workforce, more specifically the trace division of the Maryland State Police Crime Laboratory and the Baltimore City Crime Laboratory and/or in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME).

Please, join me in offering congratulations to Dr. Ellen Hondrogiannis from the Department of Chemistry as our 2019 winner of the FCSM Excellence in Teaching Award.

(As presented by Associate Dean Vonnie Shields at the Fisher College of Science and Mathematics Forum on December 5, 2019.)