Faculty Honored for Contributions to Cal Poly

Cal Poly honored several faculty members in the College of Science and Mathematics for the impact they make inside and outside the classroom, for their students and colleagues and on the world at large.

President's Diversity Award for Faculty

Louise Edwards

Physics

In just a few years on campus, Louise Edwards has become a force for helping women of color succeed in science. Edwards was recognized for mentoring underrepresented students and building more inclusive teaching practices. As chair of the Physics Department's committee for diversity and inclusion, she shares her expertise and advances the entire department's work. She also goes above and beyond to support her colleagues' professional development by leading workshops in the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology. 

Priscilla Holguin West, one of Edwards' advisees, said, "Her continued support and advocacy have given me the confidence I need to apply to graduate school and realize that a career in academia is obtainable for a student with my socioeconomic and ethnic background."

"Simply being nominated is a tremendous honor and represents deep recognition of excellent work in the areas of inclusion, equity and diversity," said Jozi De Leon, Cal Poly's Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion.

Distinguished Scholarship Award

Beth Chance

Statistics

Beth Chance has been on a mission to improve statistics education during her 20 years at Cal Poly. Consider her numbers: She’s penned more than 20 peer-reviewed publications, eight book chapters and six books; received more than $2 million in research grants; and mentored dozens of undergraduate research students, who’ve presented their findings nationally and internationally.

“More important than the numbers are (her) contributions to teaching and learning statistics,” her nomination form said. “Her pedagogical innovations have pushed statistics education in new directions, emphasizing active learning and making statistics accessible to all students.”

Much of her teaching and research involves introductory statistics courses — the kind that non-majors dread but still must take. Chance enjoys seeing these students’ initial distrust of statistics and a lack of confidence in learning the world beneath and beyond the bell-shaped curve morph into “increased appreciation” and ultimately confidence.

She has received several national awards: the inaugural winner of the American Statistical Association’s Waller Education Award in 2002 for innovation in the instruction of elementary statistics; the 2003 Statistical Education Award from Mu Sigma Rho, the national statistics honorary society, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate or graduate statistical education; and selection in 2005 as an ASA Fellow and in 2018 as an International Statistical Association Fellow.

Provost's Leadership Award for Partnership in Philanthropy

Brian Granger

Physics

Brian Granger’s work to forge partnerships with several prestigious charitable foundations and corporations at the forefront of data science and artificial intelligence development has brought outstanding research and learning opportunities to the students and faculty at Cal Poly. 

“Brian provides an excellent example of not only partnership, but of leadership in philanthropy,” said Dean Wendt, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics. “The philanthropic work Brian has done will have a lasting impact on our students, the emerging field of data science, and growth in the national and international reputation of our university.”

Granger has spent the last decade as a professor of physics and data science, and is currently on professional leave from Cal Poly to serve as principal technical program manager at Amazon Web Services. Granger is co-founder and co-director of Project Jupyter, which develops open-source software, open-standards and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. In 2018, Granger was able to leverage funding made possible by William and Linda Frost to secure $2.3 million for Project Jupyter from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Schmidt Futures.

He is also an advisory board member of the NumFOCUS Foundation and has served as a faculty fellow of the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Along with other leaders of Project Jupyter, he is a winner of the 2018 Software System Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of educational and academic computer scientists.