Recent achievements for the University of Nebraska–Lincoln community were earned by Donald Becker, Jayson Beckman, Amy Desaulniers, Fiona Dumo, Ed Harris, Amani Kirk, Kara Mitchell Viesca, Larkin Powell, Anai Torres and faculty, students and alumni from the Department of Entomology.
Honors
Amy Desaulniers, associate professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, earned the American Society of Animal Science Midwest Section’s 2026 Outstanding Young Teacher Award for instructional excellence. The award recognizes a university instructor who demonstrates an exceptional “mastery of subject, technique, vision and attitude” and the strong “ability to motivate and stimulate students. The award connects with Desaulniers’ approach in multiple ways, including her emphasis on evidence-based instruction, hands-on research training, and instructional effectiveness for students of all experience levels and backgrounds.
Interior design students Anai Torres, Amani Kirk and Fiona Dumo have been named finalists in the Steelcase 2025 NEXT Student Design Competition, placing them in the top 4% of more than 1,700 interior design students nationwide, including graduate students. Only 68 students advanced to the finalist round of this highly competitive international competition. The Steelcase NEXT competition challenges emerging designers to imagine the future of work — rethinking how, when and where people work. For the 2025 brief, students designed a 15,000-square-foot Los Angeles office for a global law firm, balancing innovation, flexibility and real-world professional demands.
Entomology faculty, students and alumni earned multiple national honors at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, the world’s largest professional organization for entomologists, with more than 7,000 members. Find the full list of honorees online.
Appointments
Jayson Beckman has joined the Department of Agricultural Economics as an associate professor and the department’s faculty chair to the Clayton Yeutter Institute of International Trade and Finance. He previously worked as a senior economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, providing policy-oriented analysis on a wide range of topics including energy and biofuels, renewable energy, fertilizers, trade and farm policy.
Biochemistry faculty Donald Becker, a professor and department chair, and Ed Harris, professor, led the renewal of the Molecular Mechanisms of Disease graduate training grant, an almost $1.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health that is the only such T32 training grant at Nebraska. The mission of the program is to equip students to be future doctoral scientists who can solve complex biomedical problems by communicating and working across traditional disciplinary backgrounds. The renewed graduate training grant will support the development of outstanding new scientists who work in collaborative multi-disciplinary teams to research disease mechanisms using quantitative approaches that ultimately yield tangible strategies for prevention and therapy. This new NIH award will allow the program to continue to support inter- and multi-disciplinary graduate training in biomedical sciences at Nebraska until 2030.
Publications
Larkin Powell, director of the School of Natural Resources, recently released a new book, “The Best of Intentions: A Story of Landscape Change in the Heart of the Great Plains." The book challenges Nebraskans to reflect on the legacy of our working landscapes and what it will take to build resilience in the years to come.
Kara Mitchell Viesca, a professor of teaching, learning and teacher education, co-authored a new book that aims to help K-12 teachers ensure their multilingual students have access to equitable, humanizing teaching and learning in all content areas. Viesca's co-author is Nancy Commins of the University of Colorado Denver.
