The College of Science is proud to celebrate the Department of Biological Sciences Instructional Lab Personnel team for being selected to receive the President's 2024 Teamwork Award, which recognizes cross-divisional staff work groups who collaborate outside their traditional reporting unit to meet institutional goals or needs. This annual award is bestowed to a team of up to fifteen members whose collective results increase productivity and efficiency, boost morale, improve customer service, support retention, or have made other notable accomplishments in alignment with UNT's strategic goals.

The hard work, commitment and dedication of this team, which includes Dr. Jaime Baxter-Slye, Dr. Arland Alberts, Dr. Syeda Alam, Dr. Andrea Bernardino, Claudia Gonzalez Villarreal, Anthony Curran, Ipsita Lahiri, Geoffrey (Lance) Brooks, Nathaniel Peterson, Carey Earthman, Wendy Pace, and Denice Gallagher, is critical for the success of department programs and ensuring that instructional labs provide experiential learning to over 2,600 students.

As enrollment has grown, instructional lab personnel's responsibilities have also increased, requiring them to continuously improvise and adjust lab offerings to meet instructional needs.

The COVID pandemic was a testing time for the team that highlighted their teamwork in surmounting all challenges to transition labs from in-person to remote offering, and subsequently to in-person offering with social distancing.

The instructional lab personnel team specifically plays a significant role in training, guiding, and supporting graduate teaching assistants. It has also been responsible for much of the development of the biology department's labs at UNT at Frisco, as the lab offerings there have more than tripled since the initial single on-campus and two remote lab offerings in Fall 2020.

The Instructional Lab Personnel share this 2024 Teamwork Award with their valued team member, Roxana Bejarano Hughes, who tirelessly and joyfully served students in her role as Microbiology Lab Supervisor from 2002-2021. May Roxana's legacy live on through the students, team members, faculty, and staff whose lives she touched.

Learn more about the Teamwork Award at https://president.unt.edu/teamwork-award