Davis and Kramer Earn Academic Innovation Awards
Stacy Davis, associate professor of Spanish and director of second language instruction, and Barbara Kramer, professor of chemistry, were the fall 2025 winners of the Truman Academic Innovation Award.
Davis was recognized for building cross-campus, cross-community, and inter-professional connections through a collaboration with Truman and ATSU medical Spanish students. Once a month, Truman medical Spanish students would travel to the ATSU campus to participate as specialized patients for the ATSU students taking an elective Spanish of the Medical Professions course that demonstrates how to perform medical interviews, review vital signs and take a patient’s medical history in Spanish. This partnership between Truman and ATSU has allowed students to develop meaningful skills that help them connect to Spanish-speaking populations in Kirksville and Milan confidently, with empathy through inter-cultural communication.
Kramer was recognized for her semester-long lab project to model the analytical process of a chemist at a contract lab. Students in CHEM 322, Instrumental Analysis, were led through a 12-week process of choosing a research question, designing an instrumental method to answer it and performing shortened versions of traditional experiments, gaining experience utilizing eight different lab instruments. During the last three lab sessions of the semester, students implemented their plan and presented their results in the form of an article in the style of the journal Analytical Chemistry. Students were able to understand the difficulties of planning and conducting chemical analyses, as well as the abilities and limitations of the instrumentation they gained experience utilizing.
