Four Honored at the Annual Faculty and Staff Awards, Including a Founders Hall Custodian

Four members of the UW–Porter Falls community received the university’s annual faculty and staff awards Tuesday afternoon in the Founders Union ballroom. Provost Dr. Bjorn Halvorsen presented the awards in front of about 230 colleagues. Each award carries $2,500 and a cast-iron plaque from the Founders Hall foundry. Nominations come from students and colleagues, and committees of past recipients choose the winners.

• Distinguished Teaching — Dr. Marit Folkestad, professor of mechanical engineering. Folkestad has taught Dynamics and Machine Design for 17 years. She rebuilt both courses around a sequence of small physical builds, and the failure rate in Dynamics has fallen from 24 to 11 percent. Eleven of the 43 nominations for her came from graduates who are now engineers.
• Research Excellence — Dr. Everett Yoon, professor of environmental science. Yoon founded the student-run Riverwatch monitoring network 15 years ago with three secondhand water sensors. It now runs 12 stations, and its data helped justify the Millrace Fish Passage that opened last October. Since 2010 he has supervised 140 undergraduate researchers.
• Excellence in Advising — Rosa Delgado-Hanes, transfer adviser, College of Applied & Technical Studies. Students say Delgado-Hanes can tell from a technical-college transcript alone whether they will graduate on time. Before the first day of class she personally checks the credit equivalencies of every transfer student she advises.
• University Service — Raymond Kowalski, custodian, Founders Hall. Kowalski has cleaned Founders Hall since 1994. Nominators say he knows which radiators bang, which lab is always last to leave on a Friday, and the first names of about four hundred engineering students.

“The nomination for Raymond had more signatures than any we have ever received. Two of them were deans. One was from a graduate who now runs a plant in Lake City and wrote that Raymond was the only person who said good morning to him for his entire first semester.”

— Provost Dr. Bjorn Halvorsen

Kowalski kept his remarks short. He thanked Facilities director Duane Kolsrud for “thirty-one years of letting me keep my own keys” and asked the engineering students in the room to push in their chairs.

Nominations for next year open in January. Yoon’s research is described on the Freshwater & Watershed Laboratory page, and students can find their own research openings through undergraduate research. Folkestad teaches in the mechanical engineering program. Building staff are part of Facilities Management.

Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu