Romo Endowed Professorship recipients create innovative learning experiences for UTSA students

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023 — UTSA faculty Kirsten Gardner, Mark Leung and Luca Pozzi have been selected as the newest recipients of the Ricardo Romo Ph.D. Endowed Professorship. Established in 2009, the two-year appointment awards faculty in the Honors College for their exceptional teaching, research, leadership and service to students.

Over the course of the professorship, selected faculty design and teach two or more experiential learning courses in the Honors College and give an annual public lecture in their area of expertise.

“This professorship allows us to further support these outstanding faculty as they develop new and enriching classroom experiences that will promote deeper learning for students,” said Jill Fleuriet, vice provost for honors education.

All three Romo Professors are recipients of the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the highest teaching award in the University of Texas System.

“This professorship allows us to further support these outstanding faculty as they develop new and enriching classroom experiences that will promote deeper learning for students.”

Gardner is a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts’ (COLFA) Department of History. Her research focuses on women’s health, social justice, technology and health care, and women in the military. She is co-principal investigator of the Democratizing Racial Justice Project at UTSA.

The course she designed for her professorship will focus on public history, and how communities learn about history in public spaces like museums and parks. Students will visit key Texas sites, including the Missions and the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio and the Blackwell School and Big Bend National Park in West Texas. Students will take what they learn from their first-hand experiences to create a unique project that contributes to public history.

Leung is a professor and associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Carlos Alvarez College of Business’ management science and statistics department. His research interests include machine learning and its applications, the design of artificial intelligence systems, data and predictive analytics, business forecasting, financial markets and trading models, and machine-human interactions and their impact on decision making.

Leung’s course will focus on supply chain management and will be based on a loosely structured but guided class environment with open-ended activities and assessments that will encourage teamwork and teach students how to successfully deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the corporate world. Through active and peer learning and hands-on discovery, students will achieve a higher level of critical thinking and analytical skills while gaining global perspective by mapping out real-world supply chain scenarios.

Pozzi is an associate professor in COLFA’s anthropology department. His research centers on primate biodiversity, conservation and evolution. He is principal investigator of the UTSA Pozzi Lab, where he and his team study primate biodiversity and the effects of human-induced environmental and climatic change on primates.

In Pozzi’s course, students will tackle the complex question of what makes us human, while exploring the uniqueness of the human species through a biological and anthropological lens. In partnership with UTSA Academic Innovation, Pozzi’s students will have a chance to travel to fossil sites and other pivotal places in human history around the globe using virtual reality (VR) technology. The course will also include gamification, where students will take components of game design like point scoring and competition to develop a playable game that focuses on misconceptions about human evolution.

In total, the Honors College offers six Romo professorships on a rolling basis, with three appointments opening each year. Gardner, Leung and Pozzi will join sitting Romo Endowed Professors María Guadalupe Arreguín and Abraham DeLeon, both professors in the College of Education and Human Development, and Nazgol Bagheri, an associate professor in COLFA.

Previous holders of the professorship include Aaron Cassill and Valerie Sponsel, both professors in the College of Sciences’ Department of Integrative Biology.

UTSA recognizes the university’s highest achieving faculty with more than 85 endowed and named chairs, professorships and fellowships. The funding received through these endowments supports faculty in their research and scholarly activities while promoting academic success for their students.

— Chloe Johnson