George Ordway selected for Arthur C. Guyton Award
The Teaching Section of the American Physiological Society (APS) has selected a physiology educator from UT Southwestern for the Eleventh Annual Arthur C. Guyton Physiology Educator of the Year Award (2003).
Nominees considered for the award are full-time faculty members of accredited colleges or universities and members of the APS. The Selection Committee looked for independent evidence of: 1) excellence in classroom teaching over a number of years at undergraduate, graduate, or professional levels; 2) commitment to the improvement of physiology teaching within the candidate's own institution; and 3) contributions to physiology education at the local community, national or international levels.
In the past, all nominees have shown excellence in teaching at their home institution and many have made significant local contributions through advising, graduate education, or curriculum design and reform. Consequently, the activities that distinguish a candidate in the rankings include outreach activities at the state, national, or international level; contributions to education through APS activities; peer-reviewed educational journal articles; and widely disseminated publications such as commercially produced textbooks, lab manuals, or software.
Dr. Ordway is a Professor in the Department of Physiology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He has been involved in medical education at Southwestern Medical School since 1981, when he was still a postdoctoral fellow. Since that time, he has filled a number of educational roles, most notably in the Medical Physiology course, of which he now serves as Director. He also contributes significantly to graduate and allied health sciences education. He is a member of the Integrative Biology Graduate Program and Co-Director of the Responses to Stress course, which examines biological responses to a variety of stresses to illustrate how cells and organisms use feedback regulation to maintain homeostasis. The course is extremely well received by students, who come from a number of graduate programs in the Division of Cell and Molecular Biology. Dr. Ordway also serves as Director of the Human Physiology course for allied health and biomedical engineering students. As with the first-year medical students, evaluations of Dr. Ordway from students in this course are exceptional and attest to his abilities as a teacher. Dr. Ordway is well known within the medical school for his excellence in teaching. This is evidenced by the fact that he has received an Outstanding Teacher Award from the first-year medical students for the last 21 consecutive years.
George Ordway is also recognized beyond UT Southwestern for his teaching abilities and contributions to medical education. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign, where he presented all the cardiovascular physiology lectures to their first-year medical students, and coordinated and taught in a course in molecular muscle biology at the University of Copenhagen in January 1999. In 1996 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, where he organized and taught a course in cardiovascular and exercise physiology for medical and graduate students. Dr. Ordway presently serves as a member of the Education Committee for the APS and on the Editorial Board for Advances in Physiology Education.
Recently Dr. Ordway was selected by President Kern Wildenthal to serve as UT Southwestern's representative to the Joint Admission Medical Program (JAMP) Council. JAMP is a new program funded by the Texas legislature to increase the number of economically disadvantaged students in all eight Texas medical schools. His selection as our representative to the JAMP Council is an indication of the high level of leadership and the unique contribution he provides this institution in the area of medical education.
Lastly, Dr. Ordway is also recognized as a distinguished teacher in his role as Director of STARS (Science Teacher Access to Resources at Southwestern), a unique multi-faceted science education outreach program that serves thousands of teachers and students throughout North Texas and beyond. Under his leadership, STARS has become an exceptional asset to UT Southwestern that contributes significantly to the education of future healthcare providers and scientists. As a direct result of his spectacular success, STARS recently received a generous endowment from Mrs. Jan Bullock, widow of Lt. Governor Bob Bullock. George Ordway is the first holder of the Jan and Bob Bullock Distinguished Chair for Science Education.
Dr. Ordway received the 2003 Arthur C. Guyton Physiology Educator of the Year Award during the APS business meeting at the April 2003 annual meeting of the American Physiological Society in San Diego. Congratulations Dr. Ordway... we are very proud of you!
