ASU Professors Honored with TTU System’s Top Teaching and Research Awards

"For more than half a century, the passionate supporters of the Chancellor's Council have helped further the collective goals of the Texas Tech University System, including recognizing and retaining excellence in teaching and research among our world-class faculty," said Tedd L. Mitchell, M.D., chancellor of the TTU System. "Our faculty members are an integral part of all we do across the TTU System. We are thankful for their contributions to our shared missions of advancing higher education, health care, research and outreach, which ensure a brighter future for countless generations to come."

The awards are funded by gifts to the Chancellor's Council, a giving society that supports the chancellor's priorities across the TTU System. Since the honors were established in 2001, 281 faculty have received awards totaling more than $1.6 million.

Carrell, an associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Geosciences and director of the ASU Planetarium, joined the ASU faculty in 2016. His astronomy research involves studying variable (pulsating) stars, known as RR Lyrae stars, in the Milky Way galaxy. Understanding RR Lyrae stars is key to modelling the internal dynamics of all stars, including our sun. He has also begun recent studies of planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets. Over the past five years, he has received over $200,000 in external grant funding for his own research, as well as that of his students, from the National Science Foundation and Rubin Observatory, among others. His research has resulted in 10 publications in scientific journals and multiple conference presentations in just the last several years. He has also mentored over two dozen undergraduate student research projects, and 10 of them have been published in various journals. He has also trained more than a dozen students on the telescopes and other advanced instruments at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, which along with undergraduate research, has helped propel many of them on to graduate school and careers in the fields of physics and astronomy. Additionally, Carrell coordinates the popular public astronomy shows in the ASU Planetarium, as well as local star observation parties and eclipse viewings.

Faught, an ASU alum (1997) and professor of Spanish in the Natalie Zan Ryan Department of English and Modern Languages, joined the ASU faculty in 2009. He consistently exceeds the criteria rating for teaching on his annual evaluations for all levels of courses, both in-person and online. He has taught a Freshman Signature Course every fall semester, spearheaded selection of a new textbook to give his students better online tools, and mentored multiple students through their acceptance to graduate school. He was also recently appointed coordinator for the all-level teaching certification for the Languages Other Than English (LOTE) program. Always looking for ways to improve his students' learning experiences, he has completed Quality Matters Training and Culturally Responsive Approaches to Serving Hispanics (CRASH) training, and he was awarded an ASU Faculty Learning Commons Mini-Grant to develop video quizzes for upper-level online Spanish courses. Additionally, he has long organized an Honors Night each spring for students of languages, he is the co-organizer of the annual ASU Foreign Language Competition for high school students, and he is the faculty advisor for the Spanish Club and faculty sponsor for the Alpha Mu Gamma national foreign language honor society. Faught's students enjoy his classes so much that they have twice collaborated to nominate him for ASU's Gary and Pat Rodgers Distinguished Faculty Award.