Congratulations to Claudio Eduardo, instructor in Spanish and faculty adviser to Pi Theta chapter of the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society. This is the second consecutive year the national society has named Pi Theta an honor chapter for its work that reflect the group's mission of honoring excellence in the study of the Spanish language and contributing to cultural understanding. See the news release for details.

The "Academic Year in Review" video presented Wednesday during the Faculty Conference highlighted numerous faculty and student achievements during 2015-16. For another look, click here. Prior to the conference, approximately 50 new faculty completed orientation sessions, including some we are highlighting here this week.

A-State welcomes Dr. Tarek Ragab, a new assistant professor of civil engineering for 2016-17. After completing his Ph.D. in civil engineering, he spent the past year as a senior research scientist at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Ragab's research interests include computational nanomechanics, computational quantification of graphene nanoribbons and carbon nanotubes, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Marc Williams, assistant professor of theatre, spent the past six years at Guilford College where he served as visiting assistant professor and acting department chair of theatre studies. He also spent the past 11 years serving as a director and accent/voice coach for professional theatre productions. Williams is an associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework and a certified actor combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors.

Arkansas State welcomes Dr. Doo Young Kim who has moved to Jonesboro after recently completing his Ph.D. in statistics at the University of South Florida. He also served as a graduate instructor at South Florida, teaching a course in computational statistics. At A-State he is joining the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as assistant professor of statistics. His research interest is clustering of time dependent information.

Mark Jordan, a new instructor in agricultural economics, most recently worked for Informa Economics in Memphis as a commodity market analyst, focused specifically on poultry and egg markets. He earned his bachelor's in agricultural business at A-State, and his master's in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas. He spends special time with family and also enjoys travel, poker, fishing and time on the family farm.