Andrew Sykes is recipient of Schwartz Distinguished Faculty Award
Sykes was recognized for contributing to the success of USD’s Chemistry Department by helping to revise Honors Chemistry, making the course an important recruiting and retention tool for the chemistry department. He is also involved with the First Year Experience course teaching incoming first-year students issues that are related to science and technology. When he isn’t teaching, Sykes has been a prolific scholar writing 18 research articles, including three articles that have been published in the past year in journals with international circulation and he is the co-director of chemistry’s Northern Great Plains Undergraduate Research Center (NPURC), one of only five National Foundation sites in the country. NPURC reaches out to chemistry undergraduates throughout the region. Sykes has been involved in working with students from tribal colleges and conducting workshops at Sinte Gleska University and Fort Berthold Community College in North Dakota. Sykes, through NPURC, will host a nanoscience workshop on the USD campus for native students next summer. The Truman and Beverly Schwartz Distinguished Faculty Award is awarded every third year to an outstanding tenured faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences who has demonstrated a truly exceptional level of creativity and productivity in scholarship, teaching and service, and who shows great promise of continuing such achievement. Sykes is the second recipient of the award. The award is named for Truman and Beverly Schwartz, who donated land to the USD Foundation. Following the sale of the land, the proceeds were used to establish an endowment to fund the award. Kurt
Hackemer, Ph.D., associate academic dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, was the inaugural recipient of the award.