Four receive Vice Chancellor's award for excellence ARTS-IN-ACTION, A leading theatre-in-education programme of the Centre for Creative and Festival Arts at the University of the West Indies' St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as four members of the academic staff at the UWI are the recipients of the Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence for 2001. The members of staff are Professor Christian Posthoff of the Department of Mathematics & Computer Sciences, St. Augustine for Excellence in Teaching and Administration; Professor Paul Levett, School of Clinical Medicine & Research, Cave Hill for Excellence in Research; Dr. Rhoda Reddock, Centre for Gender and Development Studies, St. Augustine and Professor Clement Sankat, Faculty of Engineering, St. Augustine, for All-round performance in a combination of two or more areas - Dr. Reddock for Excellence in Teaching/Administration, Research and Public Service and Professor Sankat for Research, University Service and Public Service. The Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence was instituted in 1994 to recognise excellence on the part of the academic and senior administrative staff. Awards are made in the areas of Teaching and/or Administration; Research; University Service and All-round performance in a combination of two or more of the other four areas. Each awardee receives US $5000. The awards will be presented on October 12, 2001 at a ceremony to be held on the St. Augustine Campus. Arts-in-Action, an outreach programme of the Centre for Creative & Festival Arts at St. Augustine received the award in the area of University Service for excellence in 'activities that improve the stature of the University in the Public eye'. Awardees Professor Posthoff was appointed to the Chair of Computer Science at the St. Augustine Campus in 1994. He has also served as Head of the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and the Research Director of the Department of Computer Science. His main activities comprised training and research in Artificial Intelligence. Professor Posthoff has also been teaching a broad range of undergraduate courses covering topics such as Database Management Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engin-eering and Scientific Computing. In 1995, he introduced the teaching of Internet-related courses, responding to the needs of the undergraduate and graduate programme and specifically to the needs of broader education for the public. New programmes have been introduced in keeping with current developments so as to keep the knowledge at an international level. Professor Posthoff's focus has been on interdisciplinary research in Medical Physics, which combines scientists and graduate students from the fields of Physiology, Medical Physics and Mathematics & Computer Science. Another area of interest lies in research in Artificial Intelligence, geared mainly towards the advanced field of Genetic Programming. At the administrative level, he has served as Head of Department since 1995. Under his leadership, the department was relocated to a new wing, the new computerised departmental library for books, CDs and software was established and there has been automation and computerisation of main administrative processes in the department, and the use of the departmental intranet for administration purposes. Paul Nigel Levett is Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the School of Clinical Medicine & Research at the Cave Hill Campus, Director of the Leptospira Laboratory and Hon. Consultant Microbiologist a the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Barbados. He has also held appointments as Honorary Senior Clinical Scientist at the British Royal Infirmary, Visiting Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada and Guest Researcher at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He has conducted extensive research in the area of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases, including studies involving anaerobic bacteria, early diagnosis of leptospirosis and antibiotic-associated diarrhoea and colitis. His work has led to the receipt of several grants to conduct research in areas including the development of new technologies for bacterial monitoring of the environment and molecular epidemiology of HIV in patients receiving Reticulose. Rhoda Reddock is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad. Since 1994, she has been administrative head of the centre and has also served as Deputy Chairperson of the National Institute for Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology and member of various regional and international boards. In the year 2000, she was Claudia Jones Visiting Professor in African New World Studies at Florida International University. Dr. Reddock has served as Consultant for a number of international agencies including the United Nations Development Fund for women (UNIFEM), the Food and Agriculture Organisation; the Inter-American Co-operation in Agriculture, the CARICOM Secretariat, the European Union and the Commonwealth of Learning. She was instrumental in the development of the programme of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies. Under her leadership, the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at St. Augustine has emerged as a well-established unit offering a range of services including undergraduate courses, a postgraduate programme, a research programme, a working paper series, outreach activities including specialist courses and a reading room open to the public and the university community. Dr. Reddock also has an excellent reputation as an innovative teacher. She has developed and introduced a number of new courses, modernised and expanded the content and curricula of the courses and carried out pioneering work in teaching, research and curricula development. Professor Clement Sankat has undertaken research and developmental work in the areas of Caribbean food and agro-industrial development which has been published in the leading international and regional journals in the field. His research has led to the development of a body of work related to the post-harvest handling and storage of perishable crops like fruits, vegetables and green herbs, on the drying and preservation of tropical crops, particularly fruits and herbs, on the design and development of solar dryers, including hybrid dryers, and on the design of processing machinery for tropical crops, particularly nutmegs and coconuts. Professor Sankat has for many years been actively involved in the application and promotion of Science and Technology for national and regional development. He has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Caribbean Industrial Research Institute (CARIR) since 1987 and was previously the Institute's Chairman. During his tenure as Chairman, he led the drive to re-focus and re-engineer the Institute with a strategic vision of self-sufficiency. Professor Sankat has brought the same level of leadership as Chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards. The Bureau has been actively engaged in a programme of physical and service expansion so as to better meet the needs of the business/manufacturing community in standards development, laboratory testing, product and company certification and the implementation of compulsory standards. Through his leadership, the Bureau has been refining its strategic directions, setting annual targets through business planning and tightening its financial controls. Professor Sankat has also given extensive service to the University. Over the past twenty years, he has remained steadfast to an enhanced vision of research and development which impacts positively on Caribbean society. He has worked steadily to bring such a culture of R&D to the UWI system, primarily through shifts in policies, procedures, the reward system and administrative changes.
|
