Teaching Professors of Distinction

Teresa E. Foley earned her PhD in physiology and neuroscience from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2009 and joined the faculty in integrative physiology in 2011.

She teaches a broad range of upper-division Integrative Physiology courses, including Introduction to Epidemiology, Immunology, Endocrinology, and Exercise Physiology. Foley also developed and coordinated laboratory courses in Cell Physiology and Human Physiology and played an integral role in developing the curriculum for the Undergraduate Certificate in Public Health. She has taught both small and large enrollment courses within and outside her expertise, receiving student ratings that are among the highest in the department. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Foley serves as a department education specialist who works closely with integrative physiology faculty to implement evidence-based practices in curriculum design and assessment. She also participates in the Teaching Quality Framework Initiative on campus to promote and study the use of scholarly approaches to teaching evaluation.

Among Foley’s honors are the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in STEM Education, the Best Should Teach Gold Award, and the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence Award in Teaching and Pedagogy.

Yumiko Matsunaga earned her Ph.D. in Japanese and minored in second language acquisition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. In 2011 she joined the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at CU Boulder as a senior instructor and Japanese language coordinator. Since then, she has contributed to Japanese language education at CU Boulder, and as a result the enrollment in Japanese language courses has significantly increased. The development of Japanese placement tests and Matsunaga’s guidance of the Japanese language teaching staff were a large part of her success. She has taught all levels of Japanese language courses as well as Japanese Sociolinguistics, Business Japanese, and Japanese Pedagogy courses. Additionally, Matsunaga has held pedagogical workshops and interdepartmental microteaching sessions with fellow language coordinators from other foreign language departments. Her research is focused on issues that foreign language learners face, such as identity construction, participation framework, and community building. In 2017 and 2020, she published book chapters that research foreign language housing, a form of special university housing for language learners.

Lon Abbott earned his PhD in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993. He subsequently held positions at Prescott College and Red Rocks Community College before coming to CU Boulder in 2007.

While growing up in Boulder, Abbott fell in love with mountains; he spent every possible moment running, climbing, skiing or kayaking in them. So, when attending University of Utah for his BSc., majoring in geology and geophysics was a natural choice. His love of mountains and desire to understand how geologic processes form and sculpt them has fueled his research, from graduate study of the world’s youngest mountain range, in Papua New Guinea, to his current work exploring the evolution of the Colorado Rockies, Great Plains, and Colorado Plateau. Together, Colorado’s three geographic provinces constitute one of the world’s most enigmatic tracts of high terrain; it is a joy striving, in collaboration with talented undergraduate researchers, to translate the stories told by the region’s rocks.

Abbott is equally passionate to share with others his love of the Earth through formal and informal teaching, writing, public presentations, and field trips. He has authored three geology books and over 60 articles written for broad audiences.

Heidi Day earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge, England in 1994. After graduation, she researched the neural circuitry of stress-related responses, continuing at CU Boulder starting in 1999. She started teaching full-time in 2014, after the neuroscience undergraduate degree was approved. Her research background has significantly influenced her teaching. She developed and teaches the Lab Techniques in Neuroscience course that all neuroscience majors take. This course guides students through the complete experimental process, including design, execution and write up of the experiment in the style of a Journal of Neuroscience paper. A focus of her Neurobiology of Stress class is to teach students how to interpret data in research papers. Outside of the classroom, she has focused on the continued development of neuroscience undergraduate education, by serving on the Honors Council, as faculty advisor for the neuroscience club, on department committees for undergraduate education, and as the department co-coordinator for the Learning Assistant Program.

Andrea Feldman received her PhD in Cognitive Linguistics, specializing in Language Acquisition, from CU Boulder in 1998, and joined the CU faculty in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric the following year. She holds two BA’s in Spanish and Linguistics from Cornell University. After serving as a Fulbright in Asia fellow in Japan, she received two MA’s in Linguistics and Japanese from Cornell University. She directed the Washington Academy of Language Center at the University of Puget Sound Seattle Campus for seven years prior to moving to Boulder.

Her academic interests include first and second language acquisition, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and cross-cultural rhetoric. Her publications and national conference presentations are in the areas of linguistics, second-language writing, and cross-cultural rhetoric. Her research focuses on global literacy and second language writing. She is interested in building community among monolingual and multilingual writers. In addition, Feldman works in the area of service learning and civic engagement. Specifically, she conducts workshops and conferences on immigrant integration and international students, efforts to connect workers, students, and faculty on campus. Current research focuses on digital literacy especially as it relates to first and second language acquisition.

She initiated and continues to coordinate the Program for Writing and Rhetoric’s ESL program in scientific and professional writing. In addition to teaching multilingual and professional writing courses in the PWR, Andrea teaches Honors writing courses and has served on over 50 honors thesis committees. Active in faculty governance, she has served as Boulder Faculty Assembly Diversity Committee Chair, Chair of the Chancellor’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity, and Foundations of Excellence Diversity Committee Chair. Feldman received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy in 2018.

Susan Hendrickson received her BS in Chemistry and Mathematics from Bates College (1985). After teaching at her high school in Mississippi for two years, she pursued graduate work and earned a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Colorado State University (1997).  She served as a postdoctoral assistant at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for two years before beginning her college teaching career at Davidson College.  In 2001, she moved to North Carlina State University where she was a General Chemistry Lecturer and the General Chemistry Lab Coordinator.  She returned to Colorado in 2007 and joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder as a Senior Instructor. 

While at CU, she has been active in several different areas in addition to teaching large sections of general chemistry.  She has been an instructor with the CU Precollegiate Development Program, teaching beginning and advanced chemistry classes to high school students in the summer (2008 – 2019).  She has also been active with the Learning Assistant Alliance, serving on the Resources Subcommittee since 2015 and working with Learning Assistants in her courses since 2008.  She has served as the faculty adviser for the CU Chapter of Global Brigades since 2010, including participating in six week-long brigades with students to Central America to provide medical and dental relief and to participate in public health projects.  Most recently she became a CU Wizard in 2019, allowing her to entertain and inspire young scientists with an interactive show about batteries.

Her teaching has been recognized by the Marinus G. Smith Award from the CU Parents Association for “Making a Difference” (2016), the President’s Diversity Award Commendation for Adaptations of General Chemistry Labs for Visually Impaired Students (2014), and the CU ASSETT Award of Excellence as an Outstanding Teacher for Technology in Teaching (2013, 2014).

Saskia Hintz holds a teaching certificate ("Staatsexamen") in German, Danish and Education from Pädagogische Hochschule Flensburg/Germany and a PhD in German from New York University. She joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2007. Her teaching experience includes language classes on all levels of instruction as well as culture and literature classes and Business German.

In her research she explores innovative approaches to teaching literature, culture, and particularly creative writing and visual art in the foreign language classroom and she has organized and presented workshops at the ACTFL/AATG, CCFLT and NECTFL conferences as well as for the Goethe Institute’s Trainer Networks Chicago and San Francisco. Her additional teaching and research interests are children's literature, radio-plays, poetry and short films and their use in the German classroom as well as creative uses for new technologies. Other teaching and teacher training topics include migration, social justice and the environment.

She directs the regional Goethe Institut Examination Center housed in the department of GSLL and is a tester of the Goethe Institute exams Goethe-Zertifikat B1, B2 and C1. She also is a Professional Development Consultant for the American Association of Teachers of German. 

Tina Pittman-Wagers earned her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (PsyD) from the University of Denver in 1993 and started teaching at University of Colorado Boulder in 2001. As a clinical psychologist, the focus of her undergraduate teaching has also been on clinically-oriented classes. Over the years, she has taught courses in abnormal psychology, evidence-based psychotherapy and women’s mental health. She also teaches and supervises Clinical PhD students as they learn and implement various evidence-based treatments as part of their clinical training.  

Outside of the classroom, Pittman-Wagers is engaged in service and research focused on campus mental health and wellness, the integration of wellness efforts in the classroom, women’s mental health, and psychosocial issues related to Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection, a rare type of heart attack primarily experienced by younger women. Pittman-Wagers is also a research associate with the Renee Crown Wellness Institute.

Karen Ramirez is Assistant Director for Humanities & Arts in the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program (MASP), which supports underserved students in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the CU Dialogues Program, which facilitates dialogues in CU classes across the curriculum. Ramirez earned her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003, with a focus on western American and Indigenous literatures. She completed dialogue training through Essential Partners, the Kettering Foundation, and the National Intergroup Dialogue Institute. She began teaching at CU Boulder in 2000 and worked for the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, the Sewall Residential Academic Program, and the Center of the American West before moving into her current positions.

As an Assistant Director in MASP Ramirez mentors 50-60 undergraduate MASP students each year, teaches courses in literature, writing, research and inclusive practices, and helps direct MASP’s summer bridge programs. Ramirez’s current scholarship focuses on pedagogical practices that advance educational equity, particularly dialogue as a pedagogy. Drawing on her foundation in dialogism and narrative study, her work theorizes and studies dialogue experiences as an engaged and inclusive form of learning across cultural perspectives. Her dialogue-related work includes serving as Co-PI on a multi-year Spencer Foundation Civics Measures research grant to develop measurements for assessing dialogic and deliberative engagement across difference in educational settings. She has published several articles on dialogue as a pedagogical practice.

Her earlier body of research and publishing considers narrative mappings of place in 19th/20th Century western American literature and how these narrative mappings dialogically intersect with contemporary public memory of western places. She is the author of Reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and has published on Indigenous participation in the Ramona Outdoor Play as a form of cultural continuation through public performance that dialogically negotiates with an embedded, colonialist narrative of Southern California. She has also published on narrative mappings in Willa Cather’s novels. She co-presided over the Western Literature Association in 2008, bringing their conference to Boulder, and continues to serve as a reviewer for the journal, Western American Literature.

Ramirez has received several awards recognizing her effort to put into practice her scholarly interest in educational equity, including a 2018 Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Leadership and Service and two student-nominated Marinus Smith Awards for her positive impact on CU undergraduate students (in 2007 and 2021). Under her direction, the CU Dialogues Program has been recognized with a Chancellor’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity Diversity Service Recognition Award (2015) and President’s Diversity Award (2013). 

Priscilla Craven teaches Italian language, literature and art history at CU Boulder and abroad. She received her MA in Italian from Middlebury, and a second MA in art history from the University of Colorado. She is the recipient of a multitude of teaching awards, which include the BFA Teaching and Pedagogy award, the Best Should Teach Gold award, the Marinus Smith award, and the French and Italian Department Teaching award. Craven has directed and developed multiple summer Study Abroad programs in Rome, and has been essential in working with semester-long Study Abroad programs in Florence and Perugia. She frequently travels to Italy for study, presentations, research and collaboration with Italian colleagues. Craven gave a TEDx talk in the Medici palace in Florence for Chancellor Phil DiStefano and the CU global ambassadors in 2016. She is known for conducting lectures in museums, amidst Roman ruins, and from Renaissance gardens and palaces, and makes any space into a classroom. Vanderbilt University, her undergraduate alma mater, endowed a scholarship in her name in 2006, given yearly to exceptional students of the Humanities, allowing them to graduate debt-free.

Robert Nauman earned his PhD in art and architectural history from the University of New Mexico in 1999 and joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2002. His primary area of research is architectural history from the 19th century to the present.  His book On the Wings of Modernism: the United States Air Force Academy was nominated for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. Additional publications have addressed specific architects, such as Gertrude Kerbis and Walter Netsch, as well as preservation issues as they relate to modern architecture and design. Nauman also coordinates the art and art history department’s museum internship program with area museums. Nauman served on the Test Development Committee for the Advanced Placement Art History exam for seven years, and oversaw the scoring of all AP art history exams administered in the United States during that time.

Nauman has served on the national Boards of the Society of Architectural Historians and Docomomo, and on the Board of Boulder’s Chautauqua Association. He was appointed by Governor Polis and History Colorado to serve on the Colorado Historic Preservation Review Board to review nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and the Colorado State Register.  He is a frequent advisor for projects at the United States Air Force Academy.