Three faculty members at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) have been named by the university’s Honors College to its second class of Honors Faculty Fellows.
The distinction went to Dr. Terri Johnson of the Department of Mathematics, Dr. Brinda Mahalingam of the Department of Economics and Computational Analysis and Dr. Christine Sears of the Department of History.
The Honors Faculty Fellows will serve a year-long term beginning in fall 2020. The award is renewable for a second year. During their time as Fellows, they will lead special Honors Seminars in areas related to their research and teaching, and teach sections of Honors 101, the Honors version of UAH’s First Year Experience program. The professors will also undertake service commitments to the Honors College that develop from their unique skills and backgrounds. The award includes money for the Fellows' professional development.
Dr. Terri Johnson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics.
Michael Mercier | UAH
Dr. Johnson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. She has a doctorate in applied mathematics and has been teaching at UAH for more than 20 years. In 2015, Dr. Johnson collaborated with Honors College Dean William Wilkerson to create an Honors Calculus sequence and she has taught Honors Calculus every semester since its inception. Dr. Johnson serves on the university’s Enhanced Teaching and Learning/Student Success Center (ETL/SSC) advisory board and is dedicated to improving classroom instruction. She also serves as a faculty advisor to all double majors in the math department.
Dr. Brinda Mahalingam is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics and Computational Analysis.
Michael Mercier | UAH
Dr. Brinda Mahalingam is a lecturer in the College of Business since August 2011. Prior to that, she served as a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. She teaches a wide range of courses including Principles of Economics, Introduction to Macroeconomics, Introduction to Microeconomics, Intermediate and Advanced Macroeconomics, Money and Banking, and The Stock Market. Her experiences include working for a private consulting corporation in developing cost modeling for electric utilities and running a small business. Her research expertise is in the area of econometrics applied to macroeconomic problems. She also conducts economic impact studies with Jeff Thompson of the UAH Center for Management and Economic Research. She received her doctorate in economics from the University of Colorado Boulder, and her Master of Arts in economics from both San Jose State University and Annamalai University, India.
Dr. Christine Sears is an associate professor in the Department of History.
Michael Mercier | UAH
Christine Sears completed a history Ph.D. at the University of Delaware after first teaching high school English and working at Winterthur Museum. She’s been teaching courses in the early American republic, comparative slavery and U.S. women’s history since 2007. Her research has focused on Americans who were seized by Barbary pirates or shipwrecked in the Western Sahara. In both cases, the captured men were enslaved by those living in North Africa. Her work considers their enslavement in the wider context of urban slaveries and Ottoman and North African slavery. When not teaching or researching, Dr. Sears enjoys science fiction, weight lifting and gardening.
