They are knowledgeable academics, respected colleagues, dedicated educators and thoughtful mentors. And Thompson Rivers University (TRU) is recognizing newly promoted professors with a new lecture series that highlights their achievements.
The Inaugural Professorial Lecture series debuts on Tuesday, March 29, as a recognition of tenured faculty recently promoted to full professor. Inaugural Professorial Lectures typically cover the professor’s research journey, their contributions to knowledge, what they know, what they don’t know, and what remains unknown in their field.
Inaugural Professorial Lectures are a recognized way for universities to publicly acknowledge and laud a milestone event in the careers of academics: promotion to full professor. Being promoted involves a rigorous process in which the applicant’s research, teaching and service are thoroughly evaluated by peers who assess the quality and impacts of their contributions at the local, national and international levels.
“Honouring recently promoted professors is a wonderful and powerful way to celebrate faculty, introduce them to the broader community, and to profile TRU,” says Douglas Booth, dean of the Faculty of Adventure, Culinary Arts and Tourism.
“It is important for the TRU community and the Kamloops community to know that faculty have earned the respect of peers for the impact of their work: contributions to knowledge, dissemination of knowledge to, and mentorship of, students, and service to colleagues, peers and the community.”
Lecture based on expertise
TRU usually promotes between four and eight faculty to full professor each year. Each new professor will be encouraged to give an Inaugural Professorial Lecture. The topic of the lecture is chosen by the professor and typically relates to their research expertise.
The lectures are open to the public. The first, which can be viewed online, will be given by Dr. Matthew Reudink, co-chair of the biological sciences department, whose research interests are behavioural ecology, evolution and ornithology. His lecture is titled Colour evolution across time and space.
Reudink will discuss the colour of plumage and how factors that occur over seasons and years can affect their evolution. He’ll also discuss how he and his students are attempting to disentangle these complex issues using a combination of single-species studies and large-scale analyses that aim to explore how plumage traits have evolved across all birds.
The first Inaugural Professorial Lecture takes place Tuesday, March 29, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. It’s being livestreamed on YouTube.
