Lone Star College-CyFair’s Faculty Excellence Award winners - Amy Larsen, Chris Mandia and Padmaja Vedartham – are creating a learning experience for lifelong skills as they share their personal joy for English and biology that ultimately builds confidence in students to succeed no matter their career goals.

Larsen, whose been chosen as a Texas Piper Professor nominee, has shared her love of rhetoric - “the art of persuasion, argumentation and analyzing why we make the choices we do” – with English composition students at LSC-CyFair since 2013, first as adjunct faculty and then full time for the last decade.

“My guiding purpose is to help my students experience the joy of learning, researching, and creating through writing,” said Larsen, who also teaches EDUC 1300: First Year Experience. “Writing is a liberatory experience because it helps the writer engage with another’s ideas, reflect on them, develop his or her own ideas, and share them … I see every day how writing can help a person clarify their thinking on a topic.”

Among her goals for her students are to increase their confidence and writing skills through encouragement of connecting composition to real life as well as learning crucial life skills. For example, she incorporates visual rhetoric and popular culture with the reading of graphic novels and research skills with fact-checking digital media assignments.

Mandia brings his experience as an American playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker from Los Angeles, California to his nearly a decade academic career teaching English, including as full-time faculty at LSC-CyFair since 2019 and advisor of The Barker’s Voice, LSC-CyFair’s award-winning literary journal. In addition, this U.S. Marine Corps veteran said his two tours in Iraq also shape his creative and academic work.

“The idea that ‘we teach who we are’ has always resonated with me, and I try not to separate who I am from how I teach,” he said. “As a former Marine who found direction from my time at community college, I believe higher ed should be a place of belonging and care, especially for non-traditional students.”

With a passion for passing on critical thinking and writing skills to the next generation and a desire to have fun in the classroom, Mandia’s goal is to help students recognize that they matter and education can be a transformative force as it was for him.

Vedartham said teaching biology, which began as a high school teacher in India, is more than her lifelong profession - “it’s my passion, as essential to me as eating and breathing.” The joy and excitement for her two great loves - biology and education - has continued at LSC-CyFair for more than two decades now, originally as founding adjunct faculty in the Biology Department.

Acutely aware of her impact on students, Vedartham teaches Anatomy and Physiology and Biology majors and non-majors not by rote memorization but with curiosity, critical thinking and understanding. Very student-centered, she adds that she strives to create a supportive and respectful learning environment where students are encouraged and appropriately challenged to build confidence in their abilities to succeed.

“I also strive to help them achieve their goals - not merely by earning grades, but by gaining the knowledge, skills, and mindset needed to become competent, compassionate and functional members of our community,” said Vedartham, who also received LSC-CyFair’s Faculty Excellence Award in 2012.

All these deserving award recipients are recognized at the campus and system level.