UT Alum Dr. Donna Boyd Named Professor of the Year

UT Anthropology alumna Dr. Donna Boyd (BA 1981, MA 1984 and PhD 1988) was named one of four national U.S. Professors of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on Friday, November 17, 2006.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The four U.S. Professors of the Year for 2006...were chosen from nearly 300 candidates nominated by their institutions for their "outstanding commitment to teaching undergraduate students and their influence on teaching."..."At a time when America's universities and colleges are under attack for rising costs and eroding quality," these professors "symbolize higher education's best-kept secret -- its outstanding and committed teachers," Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said in a written statement.

The winners spoke on Thursday with The Chronicle about how they approach their jobs.

Donna C. Boyd, a professor of forensic anthropology at Radford University, in Virginia, won in the category of master's universities and colleges.

"When you have unrecognizable human remains, our job is to try to identify it. Media depictions of forensic anthropology, like CSI and Bones, are a double-edged sword. They have brought in a lot more students -- more than I can handle. But the downside is they have some unrealistic expectations. They're expecting DNA evidence to be done in an hour or two; in reality it's six months to a year. They're expecting everything to be resolved, when in fact, a whole lot of cases aren't -- a lot of my cases are still in the medical examiner's office after all these years; we don't know who they are. Also there's this feeling that it's a glamorous occupation. It's not, and it's difficult. To do forensic anthropology, you have to get an advanced degree.

"The No. 1 goal is to make what you're teaching real to students. So I try to show students how the science can be applied to real-life situations. I teach them in the lab with real human bones and fragments. I take them out into the field on real cases. I try to give them multiple hands-on opportunities. We do mock crime scenes outside. We also do real fires and disasters like plane crashes.

"Students start off the course not knowing any bones -- nothing. Each student starts with a box with most of the 206 bones of an adult person. I'll say: Your project is to identify this person by the end of the semester -- their sex, size, age, race, and maybe how they died.

"The dead are speaking to us."