UNM’s Shepherd Named U.S. Professor of the Year

Ursula Shep­herd has a pas­sion for help­ing stu­dents not only to suc­ceed aca­d­e­m­i­cally, but also to believe in them­selves and seize oppor­tu­ni­ties they never thought they’d have. Because of that pas­sion, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor Shep­herd, Uni­ver­sity Hon­ors Pro­gram, Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico, is one of only four U.S. Pro­fes­sors of the Year.

Spon­sored by the Coun­cil for Advance­ment and Sup­port of Edu­ca­tion and The Carnegie Foun­da­tion for the Advance­ment of Teach­ing, the award is the only national pro­gram to rec­og­nize excel­lence in under­grad­u­ate teach­ing and mentoring.

Shep­herd is the recip­i­ent of numer­ous awards, includ­ing the UNM Pres­i­den­tial Teach­ing Fel­low­ship, the university’s high­est honor for teach­ing. Her stu­dents also attract many acco­lades, includ­ing Gold­wa­ter and National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion fellowships.

She wrote in a state­ment for the award that while chal­lenges like low grad­u­a­tion rates and stu­dents’ work­loads out­side school “can be frus­trat­ing, I teach here because here I can make a dif­fer­ence.” Her stu­dents’ suc­cesses keep her motivated.

“I believe every stu­dent who passes through my class­room has the abil­ity to be out­stand­ing. It’s my job to help each of them find what they are pas­sion­ate about and to show them that it is pos­si­ble,” she said.

As New Mexico’s flag­ship uni­ver­sity, UNM strives to stretch lim­ited resources to pro­vide an aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment where research and edu­ca­tion can thrive. “I am extremely lucky to be able to work in a sit­u­a­tion that allows me to teach in small sem­i­nar set­tings and allows both me and my stu­dents to have all the advan­tages of this large research insti­tu­tion,” Shep­herd said.

UNM Pres­i­dent David J. Schmidly wrote in his nom­i­na­tion let­ter, “Of par­tic­u­lar note is Dr. Shepherd’s enthu­si­asm to engage her stu­dents in research. She has schol­arly pub­li­ca­tions in ref­er­eed jour­nals, many of them co-authored with her under­grad­u­ate stu­dents. She has expec­ta­tions of suc­cess for all her stu­dents and they rise to meet those expectations.”

Shep­herd uses highly inter­ac­tive teach­ing meth­ods, includ­ing guided dis­cus­sion with full par­tic­i­pa­tion and fre­quent field research. She often teaches both lec­ture and lab to bet­ter inte­grate the two. She designs “each course in ways that make stu­dents respon­si­ble for the learn­ing we are under­tak­ing,” she said.

“If stu­dents are to love what they are doing, they must have the space to ask the ques­tions that excite them and to learn that the things they have read in their texts and been asked to mem­o­rize are hard won by real peo­ple, and some­times may even be wrong.”

Learn­ing this way can fos­ter a life­long pas­sion. “One stu­dent wanted to find out what the bio­lu­mi­nes­cent ani­mals were and whether they were sig­nal­ing to each other or might be try­ing to avoid preda­tors. After lots of thought, she came up with a novel approach using the light on her dig­i­tal watch to ‘talk to’ ani­mals she cap­tured. She showed that they responded to these sig­nals. She is now a behav­ioral ecol­o­gist,” Shep­herd said.

As well as teach­ing in the Uni­ver­sity Hon­ors Pro­gram, Shep­herd has taught in the Depart­ment of Biol­ogy and was pro­gram coor­di­na­tor and fac­ulty men­tor for NSF’s Expe­ri­ences for Under­grad­u­ates Pro­gram at Sevil­leta Long Term Eco­log­i­cal Research sta­tion. Her ser­vice to the com­mu­nity includes men­tor­ing fac­ulty as well as stu­dents and teach­ing in a pro­gram designed to improve sci­ence instruc­tion in mid­dle and high schools. She received a doc­tor­ate and bachelor’s degree in biol­ogy from UNM and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in social sci­ences from the Uni­ver­sity of the Pacific.

The U.S. Pro­fes­sors of the Year pro­gram salutes the most out­stand­ing under­grad­u­ate fac­ulty in the coun­try, who excel in teach­ing and pos­i­tively influ­ence the lives and careers of stu­dents. The awards focus atten­tion on mod­els of excel­lence in under­grad­u­ate teaching.