Amy A. McClure, Recipient of the Adam Poe Medal

Dr. Amy McClure, Rodefer Professor of Education, has served the Ohio Wesleyan faculty for 40 years. Books have been a constant in Dr. McClure’s life. As a child in Coral Gables, Florida, she was reprimanded for staying up too late reading under the covers with a flashlight, and she and her sister organized their books into a lending library for other neighborhood children.

She attended Ohio Wesleyan as an undergraduate, where she was a history major and honors student. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Mortar Board (leadership honorary), Phi Alpha Theta (history honorary), and served as president of Panhellenic Council. At Ohio Wesleyan, she fell in love with economics major and future OWU part-time instructor Rusty McClure. They met when Amy’s pledge class visited the Delta Tau Delta house freshman year. A mosaic heart on Delt house floor commemorates the exact spot where Amy and Rusty met 50 years ago.

After earning her Master of Arts in Teaching at Emory University, Dr. McClure began her professional career teaching elementary students in all grades and serving as a reading specialist in Lynnfield, Massachusetts; Atlanta, Georgia; and London, Ohio. During this time, she earned the Martha Holden Jennings Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching and the Outstanding Young Career Woman award from Business and Professional Women.

Dr. McClure went on to earn her Master of Arts in Reading and her Ph.D. in Children’s Literature from The Ohio State University, where her dissertation on children’s responses to poetry earned the National Dissertation of the Year award from both Kappa Delta Pi and the National Council of Teachers of English. As a graduate student, she studied school desegregation, children’s intellectual freedom, children’s theoretical understandings of poetry, and other topics related to children’s literature and reading development.

Dr. McClure joined Ohio Wesleyan in 1979 as a part-time faculty member and was made tenure-track in 1981. Her first term as department chair started just three years later, and she has served as chair for 15 of her 40 years, leading the department through its first national accreditation review.

She has served the University as co-director of the Honors Program for over 30 years, creating a Student Honors Board, initiating an Honors center, and facilitating an Honors Program redesign in 2018-2019. She has taught multiple honors courses and tutorials, including War and Peace in Children’s Literature and The Roots of Fantasy in Children’s Literature, and supervised multiple independent studies and Departmental Honors projects.

She has served on almost every faculty governance committee, and chaired the Faculty Personnel and Academic Status committees. Dr. McClure has been honored for her contributions to Ohio Wesleyan as a recipient of the Bishop Herbert Welch Meritorious Teaching Award, Robert K. Marshall Award (outstanding campus service by faculty), Spirit of ArĂȘte Award (Panhellenic Council award), and Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts College Professor of the Year. She received a Scholarly Leave grant and numerous other grants to support her research. However, her most cherished joy has been nurturing OWU students to become excellent literacy teachers and enthusiastic book lovers.

Dr. McClure’s contributions extend well beyond campus. She is the past-president of the Ohio Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the Ohio Association of Private Colleges of Teacher Education, the National Children’s Literature Assembly, the Children’s Literature SIG of the International Reading Association, and the Ohio Council of the International Reading Association. She has chaired multiple committees for national literacy organizations, and was elected as a member of the 2013 Newbery Award Committee.

Over the course of her career, she has served as an editor or on the editorial board for seven publications, published seven books on children’s literature including Sunrises and Songs: Reading and Writing Poetry in an Elementary Classroom and Teaching Children’s Literature in an Era of Standards, and authored more than 40 articles and book chapters. She serves on the Board of Directors for KIPP Academy, and A Good Start School, a summer literacy partnership program for underserved children entering kindergarten.

Amy and Rusty are parents to Haileigh McClure Roby and Kaci McClure Roby, and doting grandparents to Nash and Knox, with another grandchild due in November.

Gerald Goldstein, Recipient of the Adam Poe Medal

Gerald Goldstein, Professor of Botany and Microbiology, is retiring at the end of the 2018-2019 academic year after serving on the faculty of Ohio Wesleyan University for 36 years. Jerry received a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and had originally intended to pursue wildlife management as a career until taking a job managing the microbiology labs at his alma mater. Cleaning test tubes and Petri dishes led to teaching introductory labs, and soon Dr. Goldstein found himself pursuing his own research into viruses and viral replication. He earned a master’s degree in 1979 and his Ph.D. in 1983, the same year he was appointed Assistant Professor at Ohio Wesleyan.

Throughout his career, Dr. Goldstein mentored students in research at all levels, from the beginner to the advanced, always focusing on helping students develop their potential. As one former student said, “Jerry introduced me to the joy of the scientific question. His gentle ability to build confidence in students while teaching rigorous skills and complex concepts helped me and countless students gain mastery in the field of microbiology, but also to have the self-assurance to continue to pursue challenging work.”

Dr. Goldstein’s early research efforts at OWU focused on studying the properties of inhibitors of viral replication, for which he was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant in 1987 that led to several presentations and publications with students.

Then in 1991 an unusual research opportunity presented itself when workers enlarging a golf course in Newark, Ohio, unearthed an intact skeleton of a mastodon preserved in a peat bog. Dr. Goldstein wondered whether the preserved specimen might contain any prehistoric microbes, and he was granted permission to attempt to culture the contents of the animal’s intestines. When he was able to culture Enterobacter cloacae, a bacterium common to animal digestive systems, the discovery earned enthusiastic acclaim in the national and international media. Dr. Goldstein and his students went on to sequence the DNA of antibiotic resistance genes of the organism they had cultured, enabling comparison with the genomes of modern descendants of these prehistoric microbes.

In 1991, Dr. Goldstein collaborated with several other faculty members across the sciences at OWU to pursue an institutional grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) aimed at improving undergraduate science education, with an emphasis on providing authentic laboratory research experiences for students. Over the course of the following decade, Dr. Goldstein and collaborators were awarded over $2 million in HHMI funding, which laid the foundation for the rich research experiences OWU offers to students across the sciences today, including the Summer Science Research Program, which was initiated through the series of grants from HHMI.

The next chapter of research would begin to take flight in 1995, when Dr. Goldstein joined an interdisciplinary project including Jann Ichida in Botany and Microbiology, Jed Burtt in Zoology, and David Lever in Chemistry to study the microbes that degrade bird feathers, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Goldstein and his students cloned and sequenced the genes that help microbes degrade keratin, the major protein making up feathers, in environmental isolates collected by students under the mentorship of Drs. Burtt and Ichida. The research would go on to span 15 years and was supported by over $1.5 million in external funding, resulting in numerous publications and patents and providing research experiences for dozens of Ohio Wesleyan students.

In addition to his deep and lasting impact on the lives of OWU students, Jerry is a proud father of Kaye and Sara and husband of Marty. He plans to continue his microbiology “hobby” in retirement, studying the effects of herb and spice extracts, some of which actually increase the replication of bacterial viruses.

Alan K. Zaring, Recipient of the Adam Poe Medal

Dr. Alan K. Zaring graduated from Indiana University with majors in computer science and mathematics. He then earned both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Cornell University with a major in computer science and a minor in linguistics.

When Alan was hired as an Assistant Professor at Ohio Wesleyan in 1990, he became the first professionally trained computer scientist to teach at OWU. During his 29 years with the University, Alan played a central role in shaping our Computer Science program into one that has a distinctive combination of both theoretical and applied elements and that provides excellent preparation for both graduate school and employment in the computer industry. During his tenure, Alan advised all of our departmental honors projects in computer science. He maintained high standards and provided support for student effort and creativity.

Alan’s particular areas of expertise are in programming languages and compiler design. He taught courses across the range of our computer science curriculum, including courses on computer organization, paradigms of computation, database systems, computer systems and architecture, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and computer theory and design.

The OWU Computer Science program that he spearheaded has produced numerous students who have had outstanding success in academia, in research, and in industry. In recognition of his outstanding teaching, Alan won the Sherwood Dodge Shankland Teaching Award in 2001. He was, and remains, a valued colleague, always willing to provide advice about how best to approach a problem or a delicate issue.

Alan was active within the University, serving on the Teaching and Learning Committee, the Academic Status Committee, the Assessment Committee, and several times on the Academic Policy Committee. He served as Department Chair and provided significant input when the Science Center was renovated.

Alan has serious interests in music, and he developed and twice offered a team-taught course on computer music with a colleague the Music Department. In recent years, Alan played flute in the OWU wind ensemble.

Alan has many interests and possesses encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of diverse fields. He has commanded great respect from his colleagues and his students and has been a valued member of our department and the OWU community.

A. John Gatz, Recipient of the Adam Poe Medal

A. John Gatz was born in the suburbs of Chicago and developed an early passion for animals while visiting the Brookfield and Lincoln Park Zoos and hiking in the local forest preserve. After his family moved to Augusta, Georgia, his fascination with biology continued while roaming the countryside collecting insects and otherwise enjoying nature. John left Georgia for Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he graduated with honors in biology. His honors research on spotted salamanders culminated in a couple of his earliest publications. He spent his college summers at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory researching the effects of heated discharge water from electric power stations on estuarine organisms. John continued his education at Duke University, where he was first a teaching assistant and then an instructor. His time at Duke was interrupted by his active duty service as a combat engineer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He returned to Duke to complete his dissertation on the ecology of stream fishes in North Carolina; his publications from this research on the ecomorphology of fishes are still widely cited internationally today.

Directly after earning his Ph.D., John came to Ohio Wesleyan University, where he was hired to teach courses in ecology, comparative anatomy, and an introductory course for non-majors. By his third year here, he added “Evolution” to his teaching in response to student requests and also went to the Galapagos Islands for the first time. Later he joined the rotation of faculty teaching “Island Biology” and took groups of students to the Galapagos multiple times between 1979 and 2015. In 1983, John developed and taught a new and unique Travel-Learning Course, “Biology of East Africa,” and took students to Kenya. Now through The OWU Connection program, John has taught the course multiple times and taken nearly 50 students to Tanzania. Multiple prospective students who ultimately matriculated at Ohio Wesleyan cited their visit to this course as heavily influencing their decision (classroom sessions that included visits by cheetah cubs from the Columbus Zoo helped). John started teaching his newest course, “Human Anatomy,” so that students interested in a variety of advanced health professions could complete their required courses at OWU. Besides these regular courses, John also led a variety of seminars associated with the National Colloquium in its early years and a wide diversity of departmental seminars.

While at Ohio Wesleyan, John has continued research in multiple areas and supervised undergraduates both during the academic year and in the summer. This work has culminated in papers – many coauthored with students – related to sexual selection in frogs and toads, movement and homing in stream fishes, effects of electroshocking on fishes, foraging behavior of beavers, using the Index of Biotic Integrity for the Delaware Run that flows through campus, and the morphology of lizards. Additional publications grew out of data sets gathered as part of the ecology course he taught for many decades. In addition to this local research, he served as a visiting faculty member in the Oak Ridge Science Semester Program and intermittently did research associated with the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These years culminated additional publications on the ecology of fishes.

Beyond his teaching and research at Ohio Wesleyan, John has been heavily involved in our faculty governance system. He chaired the Zoology Department for several terms. John served on multiple standing committees of the faculty, and ultimately chaired most of those on which he served. These included both the Academic Status Committee and Academic Policy Committee, and also the Faculty Personnel Committee, a committee on which he served nearly a decade and chaired most of those years. For the past nine years, he has been the Chief Health Professions Advisor and has helped guide numerous students in their quests to gain acceptance into medical school, dental school, or other health professional programs.

Outside of Ohio Wesleyan, John prefers activities that keep him active and outdoors. He has completed 20 marathons, pedaled more than 55,000 miles on his current bicycle, kayaks regularly in the summers, and enjoys visiting and hiking in state and national parks with his wife, Tami, sons, David (OWU 2010) and Michael (OWU 2012), and daughter-in-law, Erin (Hanahan) Gatz (OWU 2010).

Theodore F. Cohen, Recipient of the Adam Poe Medal

Theodore Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1956, where he lived for the first 20 years of his life. After graduating from Franklin Roosevelt High School in 1973, he enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where on the second day of classes he met his first wife, Susan Jablin. After flirting briefly with majors in English and psychology, Ted took a sociology class and found himself fascinated. He went on to major in sociology and minor in psychology, and found his special interest in family sociology. A week after graduating from Brooklyn College, on Father’s Day 1977, he and Susan were married. They would spend 25 years together until Susan passed away in 2003.

While at Brooklyn College, Ted took a Social Theory course from Sidney Aronson and recalls deciding then that he wanted to teach sociology professionally. In 1977, he entered the Ph.D. program at Boston University, where his sociological interest in family broadened to incorporate sociology of gender, especially sociology of men and masculinity. His dissertation, which led to a number of publications and presentations, was an interview study of Boston-area men’s experiences of marriage, fatherhood, and employment. In later research (with John Durst), he would extend these interests, looking more closely at gender and family as experienced by a sample of role-reversed and opposite-shift couples in central Ohio.

While in graduate school, Ted gained considerable teaching experience and found teaching to be his true passion. Through most of graduate school, he taught introductory, family, and gender courses at B.U., while gaining additional teaching experience at a number of Boston-area schools, including Northeastern University and Clark University.

Ted was hired at Ohio Wesleyan in 1984 for what was originally to be a two-year term position as he completed his doctorate. Within weeks of completing his dissertation, his son, Danny, was born in July 1985. Less than three years later, in March 1988, daughter, Allison, was born. Both Dan and Allie eventually enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan, majored in, and graduated with degrees in Sociology and Anthropology.

With his position converted to tenure track, Ted was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1986. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 1990 and then to full Professor in 1995. In 1990, Ted was awarded the Sherwood Dodge-Shankland Award for the Encouragement of Teachers.

For most of the period between 1984 and 2001, Susan also was working professionally at Ohio Wesleyan as an archivist and curator of the archives of the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church. In 2003, Susan passed away after a 14-month struggle with a brain tumor. In 2004, Ted received an unpaid three-year leave and moved to New Jersey to be nearer to family and to Julie, whom he married in October 2005. He taught for two years at Rowan University in Glassboro and returned to OWU in 2007, with Julie and her three children, Daniel, Molly, and Brett Pfister.

Throughout his career, Ted typically taught introductory sociology and research methods, along with three popular electives, The Family, Gender in Contemporary Society, and Crime and Deviance. He also supervised numerous independent studies, internships, directed readings, and departmental honors projects. In addition, he involved numerous students in roles related to his teaching and research. At different times, he had student-assistants involved in transcribing, interviewing, and analyzing interview data, seeking and compiling permissions for his edited masculinity volume, or acting as teaching assistants in research methods. He published the work of two students and four OWU colleagues among the 41 articles and chapters in his edited volume, Men and Masculinity: A Text Reader. He also featured the work of two other students as a box feature in the 13th edition of his textbook, The Marriage and Family Experience.

Ted served on a number of faculty committees over the years and chaired the Department of Sociology and Anthropology on multiple occasions. He also coached youth baseball for many years in Delaware (with Jim Peoples) and later Dublin. In retirement, Ted looks forward to whatever life has in store. Initially, he and Julie will live in New Jersey, where he intends to teach part-time, continue to write, travel, and enjoy time with friends and family.

Nine faculty retire from OWU

Ted Cohen, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (SOAN), retired at the May commencement ceremony.

Cohen, who was hired in 1984, estimated he had taught roughly 6,000 to 7,000 students during his time at OWU.

“I wish I had an accurate count,” Cohen said.

Senior Alyssa Acevedo described him as a passionate professor, which made is easy for her to learn from him.

“He also helped me with one of my internships and he was my apprentice teacher who also advised me throughout that time and really helped me find the career that I really want to go into,” Acevedo said.

Not only did Cohen teach at the institution, but his wife and two children are also familiar with the campus.

Cohen’s son, Dante Santino (’09) and daughter Allison Cohen (’10) both majored in sociology and anthropology at the university. Allison Cohen took three classes with him, Cohen said.

Cohen’s late wife, Susan, worked as an archivist and curator of the United Methodist
collection for roughly 20 years, he said.

Cohen described the SOAN department as a “very stable family,” because he had been working with people in the department ever since he started.

Cohen will miss his colleagues and his students after retirement.

Alper Yalçinkaya, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, worked with Cohen since his arrival to the institution in 2010. Cohen was the first person Yalçinkaya met at OWU.

“He made it extremely easy for me to feel happy at this institution,” Yalçinkaya said.

“It’s been a wonderfully fulfilling place to be,” Cohen said. “And very supportive place
to be.”

After retirement, Cohen plans to move to New Jersey. He will also teach part-time at The College of New Jersey and to teach online summer school course for OWU. He also plans on working on a new edition of his textbook, The Marriage and Family Experience: Intimate Relationships in a Changing Society.

Also, retiring at the 2019 commencement were: Mary T. Howard, a 35-year professor of Sociology-Anthropology; Gerald Goldstein, a 36-year professor of botany and microbiology; Alan Zaring, a 29-year professor of computer science; John Gatz, a 44-year professor of zoology; Lynette Carpenter, a 30-year professor of English and film studies: Amy McClure, a 40-year professor of education; Paul Kostyu, a 20-year associate professor of journalism; and instructor Tom Burns, a 21-year instructor of English.