Two members of the UTC Department of Mathematics faculty and staff have earned awards from the College of Arts and Sciences. These awards were given to honor the achievements and contributions made to the college during the 2020-21 academic year.
Thandi Klingbeil received the Dean’s List Award. This award is a new category that recognizes noteworthy faculty efforts that may fall outside traditional categories but are nonetheless important contributions to the college. She was given this award fo leadership in shepherding the Statistics program in Math through a curricular transformation. She obtained the Quality Matters certification for the department’s Math 2100 Introductory Statistics course. She also conducted research that looked into whether adding a prerequisite to Math 2100 could potentially improve student outcomes. Data was collected from Spring 2018 through Fall 2020 from 3,959 students and found that students who had a Math ACT score of 21+ or those who have had a previous math course at the college level had better outcomes than students who did not achieve either of these.
Klingbeil holds a MS Mathematics: Applied Statistics degree from UTC and Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She was an adjunct professor at UTC the summer of 2017 and joined the faculty full-time in Fall 2017 as a Lecturer.
Heather Heinlein was awarded the Administrative Specialist of the Year award for her contributions to the math department during the 2020-21 academic year. She coordinated the department move to Lupton Hall even though most of the faculty were not on campus due to the pandemic. She has always worked this year to update the webpage, relaunch the department social media and blog, and set up the department’s email marketing lists to better reach faculty, staff, students and the outside community.
Heinlein holds a Masters of Business Administration from UTC and a Bachelors of Arts degree in Communications with a concentration in Public Relations from Berry College. She has worked at UTC since 2004 and has served as the Administrative Specialist in the Department of Mathematics since 2009.
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