2022 Faculty Merit Award Winners

Dr. Ann Green’s commitment to excellence in advising is as deep as the orbit of her influence is broad. Each year, she writes dozens of support letters for students in programs across the university who are applying for Summer Scholars projects, Phi Beta Kappa induction, medical school admission and post-graduate volunteer service opportunities. She also writes letters in support of paroles, pardons and commutations, advising with equal commitment the students whom she encounters in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. As a member of the Health Professionals Advisory committee, Dr. Green interviews every SJU student applying to medical, dental or veterinary school and reads extensive application materials with an eye to strengthening these. She also regularly directs Summer Scholars projects that are outside of English but social-justice related. Over the last three summers, two of six Summer Scholar advisees were biology majors. Dr. Green also advises honors theses, often interdisciplinary ones as for a student in environmental science who wrote essays on writing and climate change. Dr. Green even advises and supports students long graduated. Keeping in touch, supporting graduates beyond their years at St. Joe’s, is a testament to her commitment to excellence in advising.

Ken Weidner has been an outstanding advisor for students in the Business Administration major. What makes Ken such an engaged and effective advisor is his unrelenting student focus and encyclopedic knowledge of the academic catalog, policies, and procedures. His typical advising responsibilities entail supporting approximately 30 students. Ken continues to use creative, student-centered approaches. In addition to his assigned advisees, he has done significant advising of students interested in Summer Scholar research. This work entails meeting with students, determining mutual research interests, supporting the students’ applications, and then guiding them through the research process. He is exactly the type of student-centered advisor all SJU faculty should aspire to be like. We are very fortunate to have Ken Weidner as a faculty advisor in the Haub School.

Dr. Samantha Riggleman is an Assistant Professor in the Special Education Department who serves as the coordinator of the undergraduate Autism Behavioral Studies (ABS) major and the director of the Applied Behavior Analysis Master’s degree program. In these two roles, Dr. Riggleman advises and/or supports approximately 370 students. During Academic Year 20-21 she was the sole advisor for all students in these programs. Even with this exceptionally high case load of advisees, Dr. Riggleman performed her role as faculty advisor well. For her students, she addresses course scheduling needs, offers career guidance, and assists students in navigating the complex Board Certified Behavior Analyst certification process nationally and state level credentialing for students in Pennsylvania and around the country.

Samantha is attentive to detail, anticipates the implications of scheduling decisions in effort to minimize conflicts with students’ plans, and is able to help Applied Behavior Analysis majors navigate the curriculum, examination requirements, and supervised clinical experiences. Dr. Riggleman prioritizes meeting the needs of her students. She supports transfer students, adult learners, and out of state graduate students. In her communication with her students, Samantha’s professionalism and interpersonal skills lead to the successful resolution of complicated advising and career guidance concerns. 

Because she is certified across several areas of expertise, Samantha also supports and mentors Special Education majors. She is a faculty co-advisor to Kappa Delta Pi, the education honor society and willingly steps forward to be of service to current and prospective students whenever possible. Dr. Riggleman is highly respected by students and faculty alike. 

At the department level, Dr. Riggleman exceeds the criteria for effective advising and goes beyond advising duties to support student success, update curriculum, and integrate effective assessment processes. 

Dr. Riggleman has demonstrated the qualities of an effective and outstanding student advisor. She is well regarded by her students who are visibly excited to see her around campus in and out of the classroom. Special Education and Applied Behavior Analysis students benefit from her positive and caring dedication. She is recognized as most deserving by her departmental colleagues. It is with great pleasure that, for her commitment and service to advising School of Health Studies and Education students, we recognize Dr. Samantha Riggleman with this award.

Dr. Logio has served the University, its faculty, and its students selflessly during the past academic year and throughout her career. Most recently, Dr. Logio served concurrently as a member of University Council, the Board of Rank and Tenure, the Institutional Review Board, AAUP, Academic Policies and Procedures, and the Linguistics Program Advisory Board. Prior to last year, she served eight years as Chair of the Sociology Department, while also serving two elected terms on CAS College Council Executive Committee. In addition to her breadth of work on behalf of Saint Joseph's University, Dr. Logio shows the depth of her commitment to the Jesuit mission of the University in every aspect of her service. She has deftly mentored both colleagues and students as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Whether she is hiring new faculty, shepherding faculty through the tenure and promotion process, advising students, or devising new programs, she approaches her service with cura personalis top of mind. Moreover, she does this work with evident joy. The University community has greatly benefitted from her dedication and commitment.

We are thrilled to honor Dr. Marybeth Ayella with a faculty merit award for teaching. For more than 35 years, Dr. Ayella has been a member of the Sociology department and her courses on Cults, Mental Health and Human Sexuality are among the most popular and widely-sought after seats in the program. Dr. Ayella is an excellent teacher who is deeply committed to student learning and over the past several decades, she has influenced thousands of students to cultivate their sociological imaginations and think critically about our social world. As her chair, Dr. Brown writes, “Teaching is her calling, it is her passion; it’s what keeps her motivated to work at SJU.” Dr. Ayella is also deeply passionate about students’ mental health and ten years ago, she founded our chapter of Active Minds, to raise awareness about the silence surrounding the mental health struggles of students. With her leadership, SJU was chosen to host the prominent program, “Send Silence Packing” twice—this is an incredible honor and testimony to Dr. Ayella’s hard work and dedication. Congratulations, Dr. Ayella, on this well-deserved honor!

Dr. Christopher Heasley has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership since 2017. He was hired for his expertise in higher education, primarily to teach in the doctoral program. Because of his extensive teaching experience, Dr. Heasley came to the department as a seasoned teacher and is highly regarded by both students and peers. Doctoral students refer to Dr. Heasley as a very knowledgeable and caring teacher. This is no small accomplishment as he regularly teaches quantitative methodology, a course students find particularly challenging. Dr. Heasley’s artistry as a teacher has also gained him high praise from his colleagues in the department and beyond. Anyone witnessing his classes will come away with the feeling of having experienced Saint Joseph’s teaching standards at the highest level. Dr. Heasley is a dedicated advisor who had guided numerous doctoral students to the successful completion of their program. Thus, he is consistently sought out to chair dissertation committees. Dr. Heasley’s teaching contribution to the department has been paramount, particularly in the recent curriculum review of our masters’ and doctoral programs. Dr. Heasley has been an asset to our department, and we are really lucky to have him as our colleague!

John Keller is a master teacher whose skills in the classroom and overall dedication to teaching excellence have truly raised the bar for teaching in the Philosophy department. By any measure, he is an extraordinary instructor. While teaching complex and highly abstract material, he nevertheless has exceptional rapport with his students, uses ingenious and (for him) labor intensive methods to increase student engagement and participation, ais adept at making on-the-spot adjustments—a mark of the seasoned teacher, and is self-critical of his teaching almost to a fault in order to improve it. He deliberate in including thinkers from underrepresented groups in his course materials, incorporates clear syllabus statements concerning inclusive language and conduct, and makes efforts to re-center (without putting students “on the spot”) marginalized voices. He has fostered and encouraged collegial conversations among department members concerning teaching excellence. Widely praised by both his peers and students, he is at pains to include material from underrepresented communities. His concern for student learning, passion for continuous improvement, and dedication to issues of justice, diversity, and inclusion are remarkable and worthy of recognition with a 2022 Teaching Award.

Dr. Porth adheres to high standards of rigor in all of his courses while also demonstrating and enduring commitment to cura personalis, getting to know and care about each of his students. one student lauds him as “a dedicated leader committed to all students’ success.” Dr. Porth’s signature course is Business Policy, the Haub School of Business’ undergraduate capstone course which he was instrumental in founding and for which he wrote the text. The course Includes a semester-long team project, and each semester one team per section participates in a Business Policy Competition. Dr. Porth’s teams often take first place honors and, as with his teaching in general, the key to his success as competition mentor is the excellence to which he holds himself and his students, together with the individualized attention and guidance he offers. Dr. Porth has also made numerous contributions to the Haub School’s MBA Programs; indeed, he is at the forefront in the development of new courses. He is a generous mentor to his faculty colleagues and, beyond

Dr. Aaron Reich is not only a gifted teacher and scholar of Chinese Religions, but also of life itself. In his courses, he is known to ask his students, “When does a person do her best work?” This question comes during a class session also illustrated by Chinese characters, paintings, and pictures of artifacts that enable his students to transcend time, culture, and geography. When they learn about something foreign, they also begin to learn about something that they thought was familiar – themselves. As SJU crept back towards normalcy in our classrooms, his work in the hyflex environment was described by a peer reviewer as “nothing short of astonishing.” This is because he has spent six hours preparing his slides and other content for every hour in the classroom, displaying his own calligraphy of Chinese characters, as well as his photography and videos of ritual objects and ceremonies. Employing lectures, discussions, writing exercises, and material objects he leads his students to understand that they do their best work by losing themselves in it – and that this approach can become an almost spiritual experience that helps them appreciate what “harmony with nature” might mean.

Dr. Josephine Shih is a dedicated teacher who has been teaching critical, required courses in the psychology major throughout her time at SJU. She created the psychology program’s Clinical Concentration, which has become a central part of the psychology department’s mission. In support of the concentration, Dr. Shih has developed a cutting-edge course on Clinical Psychological techniques and has also recruited and mentored Philadelphia area clinical psychologists to serve as adjunct faculty. Dr. Shih's undergraduate teaching has a reputation for innovation. The "Mental Health Speakout”, an annual event at Saint Joe’s, was the product of a student project in her course on Psychological Disorders. Students in her Multicultural Psychology class - and their parents - often remark about how much they learned about the impacts of poverty on mental health from Dr. Shih's “budget project”. Her dedication to graduate mentorship is best evidenced by the success of her students. Ten of Dr. Shih's graduate students are either enrolled in or have graduated from doctoral programs. Dr. Shih works extraordinarily hard at being a great teacher, and her department and the University have greatly benefited from it!

In 2021, Dr. Abbas published a single-authored book, Partition’s First Generation:Space, Place and Identity in Muslim South Asia, with the prestigious academic press, I.B. Tauris,that put her manuscript through a rigorous process of blind peer review. provides a history of the 1947 partition of what had been British India into two new countries: India and Pakistan. Dr. Abbas tells this story through an in-depth examination of how the students and graduates of the Aligarh Muslim University in New Delhi experienced the upheaval of partition, interviewing 70-some former students there. Dr. Abbas also visited numerous libraries and archives in India, Pakistan, England, and Bangladesh, utilizing multiple languages. Her single-authored chapter, “Masculinity and the Muslim University in the 1940s,” appeared recently in the edited volume, Oxford of the East: Aligarh Muslim University, 1920-2020 and she has moreover begun research on another topic related to the South Asian Diaspora, namely its effects on burial practices and memorials; in 2020, she published a single-authored article, “Death, Distance, and the Digital World,” in the journal, The Deathbed, Nursing Clio. Her ground-breaking work in preserving the history of trauma through oral history richly deserves this award for research.

Dr. Baskin’s research has set the stage for research in a number of areas in retailing for the food marketing scholarly community. He has published research on how the environment can influence the way foods are positioned at a micro-kitchen at Google as well as on the way that email messages are framed convinces people to get a flu vaccine. He has also demonstrated that product labeling often influences consumer perceptions of sustainability, and consumer purchases are affected by a product’s comparative contexts. His analyses of food marketing promotions in the context of language reveal the influences of meaningless descriptors and of recommendations by others. His pursuit of these related but separate topics has led to an impressive and steady stream of peer-reviewed publications and shows him to be a leading researcher in his field. Congratulations on establishing and maintaining such an impressive stream of high-quality publications!

In 2021, Dr. Close published a single-authored book with the highly prestigious Cambridge University Press: State Formation and Shared Sovereignty: The Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 1488-1696. The book is a profound comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries during a formative time in European history from the late 15th century to the immediate aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Dr. Close’s research in this book provides new perspectives on early modern European politics, the formation of states in Europe, and how state formations change and develop over time. It and his other publications have already reframed discussion of early state formation. In addition to the book, Dr. Close published an editorially-reviewed blog post with Cambridge University Press and delivered two academic presentations: one via Zoom at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and an hour-long interview for the podcast New Books in History. Finally, he has three articles forthcoming in editorially reviewed volumes and is currently working on a new book manuscript. We are delighted to recognize his outstanding scholarly achievements with this award!

Dr. Heasley’s scholarly expertise addresses 2 separate and important categories. First, regarding educational environments and student outcomes he examines public-private partnerships (e.g., residential housing, shared learning spaces) at colleges and universities and second, he analyzes transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming student experiences in higher education contexts, including Jesuit colleges/universities. In the past 6 years,5 of which were at SJU, Dr. Heasley published 11 peer-reviewed or invited articles and book chapters and even books. In almost all of his publications, he is the solo author or the lead author. Additionally, Dr. Heasley has presented more than 50 scholarly papers and/or panels at leading disciplinary and/or practitioner conferences, year in 2021, including two double blind peer reviewed solo authored publications, a solo authored book chapter, a first author book, and eight scholarly presentations. Moreover, he engaged in the data collection phase (i.e., IRB, focus groups, site visits, document analysis) of a grant-funded project situated in United Kingdom and Northern Ireland colleges and universities. He is the model of a teacher-scholar, working extensively with our students at all levels. His notable publications and pedagogical engagement make him well deserving of this award for outstanding research.

Dr. Kates is a nationally known expert on the range of ethical issues associated with sweatshops, a research area that ties directly to SJU’s mission. Michael has published four different pieces of original peer-reviewed scholarship this year in several important venues, including Law, Ethics, and Philosophy and Business Ethics Journal Review. In addition, as his scholarly reputation has grown, Michael has been invited to conduct peer reviews for some of the most outstanding journals in ethics, business ethics, and social and political philosophy, demonstrating that his scholarly expertise extends beyond his particular area of sub-specialization. In 2021 alone he reviewed nine different papers for seven of the leading journals in ethics and business ethics, all of which are ranked publications. His record of scholarship in general and in this past this year specifically is truly outstanding and eminently supports this reward for scholarship.

Dr. Aisha Damali Lockridge exhibits an exceptional and continued commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as evidenced by her teaching, scholarship and service. 

Aisha’s labor toward inclusive excellence is tireless. Let me note a few of her contributions: 

• served as President of Faculty Senate and shepherded the Report Recommending Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Language for Tenure and Promotion in the Faculty Handbook through the governance process;
• conducts research about Black literature and culture;
• she helped implement, teaches and administers INT 151, Inequality in American Society;
• helped to revise the English department curriculum to embed more DEI content throughout the major;
• co-facilitated sessions at the 2020 & 2021 Days of Dialogue;
• infuses her courses with DEI topics & projects,
• Teaches diversity-certified courses for the English major as well as DGNW-certified courses within the GEP; and 
• mentors students & colleagues about DEI.

It is with great pleasure that we recognize Aisha’s commitment to diversity, equity & inclusion with this award.

This year’s recipient of the Faculty Award for Justice is awarded is Dr. Shenid Bhayroo, Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Bhayroo excels in incorporating issues of justice and injustice in his discipline of journalism as his teaching and scholarship routinely addresses issues of systemic inequality with a particular focus on marginalized groups. Throughout his courses, whether on campus or in South Africa, Dr. Bhayroo challenges students to critical examine systemic social injustice. Until the pandemic, Dr. Bhayroo annually brings a group of students to South Africa, spending a month researching and reporting on justice issues there. Previously, students have reported on education, prisons, and farming in South Africa. Moreover, Dr. Bhayroo’s attention to the dynamics of teaching students both inside and outside the classroom has proven a great asset to the English department and, most importantly, to students. He understands that challenging students to improve their writing is an ongoing work, accomplished as much by individual consultation—at which he excels—as by in-class work. Dr. Bhayroo’s most recent scholarship and soon to be published “Creating Liberatory Spaces”— explores the necessity of creating alternative spaces for social justice work and uses the “Making Worlds” bookstore he cofounded as an example of this. His forthcoming essays on The New York Times’ coverage of the Cuban Revolution as well as an article on study abroad programs also deal with social justice and its implications for writing and the classroom.Finally, since beginning his career at Saint Joseph’s as advisor to The Hawk, Dr. Bhayroo has worked to promote a journalism that does justice into every aspect of The Hawk’s reporting. As Drs. Brennan and Green note, “He has encouraged reporting on the university’s efforts to move toward racial justice and mentored an increasingly racially diverse staff of reporters to cover campus protests on racism thoroughly….The Hawk has pushed this community to reflect on its mission... Good journalism keeps the university honest, and at a Jesuit university, this means it pushes us toward justice.” Aligned with Fr. Kolvenbach’s call for Jesuit education, Dr. Bhayroo’s work consistently, “address[es] the actual world as it unjustly exists” in both its process and its content. Please join me in congratulating Dr. Bhayroo.