Three Idaho State University faculty members honored as 2018 Distinguished Faculty  

“These are the highest honors bestowed on faculty at Idaho State University and it is a distinction to receive one of these three awards,” said Laura Woodworth-Ney, ISU executive vice president and provost for academic affairs. “These are among our accomplished faculty and we are proud to recognize them.”

Distinguished Service, Glenda Carr – Carr, a clinical assistant pharmacy professor, has taught at ISU-Meridian since 2002.

She is co-founder and director of ISU’s Community Health Screening Program—six free screenings held annually in the Treasure Valley to connect underserved and underinsured adults to medical, dental and mental health services.

Since the program’s inception in 2010, the screenings have served more than 1,000 adults, keeping many participants out of hospital emergency rooms and easing the financial burden on Ada County taxpayers. The screenings provide ISU student clinicians with an interdisciplinary educational experience unsurpassed in Idaho.  Community partners include Ada County Indigent Services, Family Medicine Residency of Idaho, Terry Reilly Health Services, the Friendship Clinic, the Idaho Foodbank and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.

When Carr isn’t mentoring or teaching students, she is likely pulling a shift at Terry Reilly Health Services in Nampa, a community health center dedicated to providing affordable, comprehensive and quality care to Treasure Valley residents.      

Since 2007, Carr has co-advised the ISU chapter of the American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Student Pharmacists. Her duties involve guiding students in community outreach projects such as Operation Immunization, Operation Diabetes and Meth Awareness. In 2017, the APhA named her Outstanding Chapter Advisor of the Year. 

Carr holds a pharmacy doctorate from University of Montana.

Distinguished Teaching, Andy Holland – Holland has taught in ISU’s Department of Chemistry since 2004, teaching more than a dozen different courses across all levels of the inorganic and organic chemistry curricula.

In addition to his work in the classroom, he coordinates a department-wide summer research program for disadvantaged high school students, helps shape the general education program on both university and statewide committees and contributed to the acquisition and

administration of a National Science Foundation scholarship program for future chemists at ISU. He has personally supervised more than 60 high school, undergraduate and graduate students studying transition metal compounds in his research lab.

Even at the freshman and sophomore level, Holland’s lecture courses emphasize patient, critical problem solving both as a target skill and as a means by which to deepen students  understanding of chemical concepts. This approach is supported by a program of in-class collaboration among students, long office hours and even longer tests. His lab sections aim to provide safe opportunities for students to indulge their own curiosity and ingenuity in addition to following directions. All of Holland’s classes are founded on his conviction that given a structured, supportive framework for learning, ISU students will far exceed their own academic expectations if they are encouraged to do so.

Distinguished Research, Michele Brumley –  Michele Brumley is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Psychology. She joined ISU in 2007 after earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology from DePaul University, her Ph.D. in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience from the University of Iowa, and completing postdoctoral research at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Brumley’s long-term research goal is to increase understanding of neural and behavioral development by identifying important processes that contribute to the production of. developmental outcomes. She has published work on the effect of neural systems, sensory feedback and experience-expectant processes on early motor development. Results of that research have demonstrated that spontaneous limb activity and coordinated action patterns are responsive to sensory feedback, postnatal experience and stimulation from a caregiver during the newborn period in rats. These empirical findings have been important in reconsidering early neurobehavioral activity as open to experience rather than prescribed and innate, no matter how simplistic and rigid the behavior may appear.

Current research efforts in the Brumley Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory are focused on: 1) behavioral epigenetics in the developing spinal cord, 2) the relation between neurobehavioral function and the musculoskeletal system during development and 3) maternal-infant reciprocity influences on developing psychological domains in human infants.

Brumley’s work has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), NIH IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence program, ISU and the Burroughs Welcome Fund. Brumley is currently the editor-in-chief for the journal Developmental Psychobiology. Brumley received ISU’s Distinguished Teaching award in 2016.