Stetson University proudly announces the winners of the 2024 Hand Awards for Distinguished Faculty Achievement. These annual awards recognize outstanding faculty for their contributions in community impact, research, and professional activities. Congratulations to this year’s honorees:
Hand Award for Community Impact
Wendy Anderson, Professor of Environmental Science and Studies
The 2024 Hand Award for Community Impact recognizes a faculty member who came to Stetson University in 2014 as a department chair. In her almost 10 years at Stetson, she has achieved a distinguished record of community service, becoming a vital public figure and environmental champion in the broader West Volusia community. She chairs the Volusia Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, contributes a regular column to The West Volusia Beacon about locally relevant environmental issues, and serves on two advisory panels tasked with land management. She has also served on the Volusia County Environmental and Natural Resource Advisory Committee. Her ability to bridge political divides and navigate complex bureaucracies in the name of safeguarding the region’s shared natural and water resources is truly commendable. In so doing, she has enhanced Stetson’s profile, further advancing the university’s mission and values. This environmental scientist is described as a consummate community-engaged teacher-scholar, leveraging both her community connections and environmental expertise to enrich her students’ educational experiences. At Stetson, she reimagined the structure of the Department of Environmental Science and Studies and was instrumental in the creation of the Sustainable Food Systems Program. In her nomination packet, boasting numerous letters of support from faculty, staff, students, and DeLand community collaborators, multiple nominators refer to this faculty member as a “force of nature,” with one supporter noting that her level of community engagement is “nothing short of extraordinary.” Her primary nominator summarized her vast qualifications as follows: “I am honored and proud to work with her in the same department, where she effectively
showcases science in action. She embodies a conscientious scientist who takes her knowledge to streets, communities, city hall meetings, and her classrooms with the ultimate goal of passionately serving humanity. She has taught her students, in action, how to engage with individuals in positions of power and policymakers, compelling them to listen and take action to safeguard our shared environment.
For her professional commitment and her exceptional contributions to the university and broader communities, it gives me great pleasure on behalf of the faculty, staff, and students at Stetson University to present the 2024 Hand Award for Community Impact to Professor and Chair of Environmental Science and Studies and Director of the Sustainable Food Systems Program, Dr. Wendy Anderson.
Hand Award for Research, Creative, and Professional Activity
Dr. Carol Azab, Associate Professor of Marketing
The first 2024 Hand Award for Research, Creative and Professional Activity recognizes an outstanding faculty member who – in her short time at Stetson University – has established herself as one of the most productive scholars in the School of Business Administration. This faculty member’s scholarly inquiry focuses on services marketing, global marketing, and the influence of the marketing function within the firm and the discipline. A hallmark of scholarly pursuits is peer review – the sharing and public testing of scholarly inquiry. The exceptional quality of this researcher’s scholarship is evidenced by the successful acceptance of 10 peer-reviewed journal articles in just eight years. Seven of her 10 papers have appeared in the most prestigious top-tier journals in the field, including the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Behavioral Finance. These journals enjoy some of the highest impact factors, which are proxy measures of the importance, deep rigor, international reach, and appeal of the published research. One of her articles – on new rules of social media shopping – garnered the distinction of the most cited paper in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour in 2022, for which she won an award. By pursuing research projects with current and former colleagues, and supervising at least eight student research groups annually, her
students have benefited significantly from her expertise in a broad set of analytical techniques. More specifically, her work in services marketing has helped redefine disciplinary knowledge and as a teacher-scholar, she has brought her findings to the classroom and transformed her marketing courses. In sum, her work has influenced the direction and evolution of her discipline. One faculty nominator wrote, “[This scholar] is passionate about justice in service recovery, establishing equity when companies fail customers’ expectations and [are] trying to win them back. Her research is significant because it deals with stereotypes of minority customers and the use of primary and secondary language in service encounters.”
Through her stellar scholarship and impressive service to her field, this faculty member contributes impressively to Stetson University’s scholarly and intellectual vibrancy. In 2023, she received the School of Business Administration’s Outstanding Researcher of the Year Award. It gives me great pleasure on behalf of the faculty and staff at Stetson University to present the 2024 Hand Award for Research, Creative, and Professional Activity to Associate Professor Dr. Carol Azab for her professional commitment and her exceptional scholarly contributions.
Hand Award for Research, Creative and Professional Activity
Jean Smith, Assistant Professor of Biology
The second 2024 Hand Award for Research, Creative and Professional Activity honors a faculty member who has rapidly established herself as a leading scientific researcher and whose quality of research has had a transformative impact on the field of molecular biology. Since arriving at Stetson University in 2019, this scientist has acquired an impressive publication record by repeatedly publishing her research outcomes in top-tier, high impact scientific journals, including Science, Genetics, and The Journal of Cell Biology. Within the past five years her body of research has been cited in the published works of other scientists approximately 500 times. Furthermore, she has garnered major grant support including a recent multi-year award from the National Science Foundation for more than half a million dollars. As a Stetson University teacher-scholar, this faculty member has demonstrated the unique integration of the teacher’s facilitation of students’ learning with her own continuous scholarly development in two ways. First, her involvement of students as researchers in
her own professional development has led to ground-breaking research in molecular biology, and the team’s work has led to novel findings in the molecular mechanisms of cell fusion—a process essential for sexual reproduction in all organisms. Seven of her mentored research students have won best student presentation awards at scientific conferences. Second, her scholarly work infuses her courses with research-rich experiential learning opportunities for students. This is particularly noteworthy in her Genetics and Microbiology offerings—two courses that now form a vital core of Stetson’s extremely successful health professions curriculum. Several of her students have been recruited into the nation’s top graduate programs. One faculty nominator wrote: “She is an exemplar of the way in which an excellent, rigorous scientist can mentor and excite students, introducing them to concepts they may have never considered, and making the previously inconceivable understandable and attainable”.
It gives me great pleasure on behalf of the faculty and staff at Stetson University to present the 2024 Hand Award for Research, Creative, and Professional Activity to Assistant Professor Dr. Jean Smith for her professional commitment and her exceptional scholarly contributions.
