University Distinguished Faculty Awards

Maggie Mac Neil, Olympic swimmer and LSU sports management alumna, announced her plans to retire from competitive swimming on September 26th, 2024. Mac Neil will be joining the inaugural advisory board for the LSU Women's Sport and Health Initiative in the College of Human Sciences and Education's School of Kinesiology.

Timothy Page, PhD, has authored a new book titled Psychosocial Theories of Human Behavior and Development: An Evolution of Big Ideas. He aims to educate students across the various helping professions with his latest publication.

Assisting a stroke survivor in regaining movement in their face. Teaching toddlers how to improve their fine motor skills to get them prepared for school. Helping our LSU football players off the field following a blow to the head.

LSU was selected as an Institute Partner for the 2024 Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. The Fellows engaged with Louisianians to establish meaningful professional networks in the state. During their recent trip to New Orleans, Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, PhD, a professor at the School of Education, hosted them at her home for a fish fry.

The LSU Writing Project held its first place-based Invitational Summer Institute on Mallard Island in the Rainy Lake Watershed, north of International Falls, Minnesota. Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, PhD, director of the LSU Writing Project, submitted a proposal to the Ernest Oberholtzer Foundation to host the week-long writing institute.

Cynthia DiCarlo, PhD was awarded the 2024 National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators (NAECTE) Foundation Established Career Early Teacher Educator Research Grant Award Winner. Dr. DiCarlo was selected as the top-scoring application after the review by a team of NAECTE peer reviewers for her project "Child Sustained Attention in One-Year-Olds." This project is part of a research series that has focused on identifying which teaching conditions (child choice, adult choice, or adult presentation) that elicit increased levels of engagement based on child age. Previous research on four-year-olds, three-year-olds, and two-year-olds has noted distinct differences in child attention based on teaching conditions. The goal of this project is to help provide direction to practitioners on the best teaching conditions to use with children at different ages to increase children's attention and engagement with materials. DiCarlo will be recognized at the National NAECTE conference on November 6 in Anaheim, California.

Early Childhood Education Institute (ECEI) Researchers, Michelle Brunson, PhD and Cynthia DiCarlo, PhD, along with their colleagues Ashely Boudreaux, Debra Jo Hailey, and Katrina Jordan, recently shared strategies for involving families in early childhood education in their article, "Engaging Parents as Partners Using Traditional and Distance Learning Models" in the practitioner publication ChildCare Exchange.

To secure funding to build the early care and education pipeline, the LSU Early Childhood Education Institute (ECEI) and the Louisiana Board of Regents collaborated on a submission to the Louisiana Workforce Commission to develop a path for those interested in pursuing a career in early care and education - the Registered Apprenticeship for Early Care and Education Teachers. This initiative will provide funding to those interested in working in the field but who are not yet working in an early care and education program. This funding will parallel the funding available to those currently working in Type 3 childcare centers through the Louisiana Department of Education's LA Pathways scholarship fund.

Tracey Rizzuto, professor in the School of Leadership & Human Resource Development, is LSU PI, and Christiane Spitzmüeller, professor at UC Merced, is the lead investigator for the $4.5 million NSF grant that will create a Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement.