UA Education Professor to Receive Blackmon-Moody Award

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Stephen Katsinas, director of the Education Policy Center at The University of Alabama, will receive the 2012 Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor Award Friday, Oct. 19 at UA’s President’s Mansion.

Katsinas, an expert in higher education finance and state/federal higher education policy, has served as director of UA’s Education Policy Center since 2005. He’s also a professor of higher education in the department of educational leadership, policy and technology studies in the College of Education.

The Education Policy Center conducts research and provides policy-related analysis to support expanded access, equity and academic achievement in public schools, community colleges and universities.

The Center is also host to The University of Alabama Superintendent’s Academy, which is funded through an annual contract with the Alabama State Department of Education.The Center conducts an annual national survey of state higher education leaders that is widely featured in the national education media.

Katsinas is involved in a study of the impact of recent changes in the Pell Grant program in the states of Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.

Katsinas assisted the Office of Academic Affairs and the College of Education in successfully landing a four-year grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to support the Alabama College Transfer Advising Corps, which placed recent UA graduates at 13 hard-to-serve rural community colleges to aid rural students with the transfer navigation process to four-year institutions in Alabama.

Katsinas has visited more than 400 community colleges in 40 states. He is a consulting scholar to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He held similar posts at the University of North Texas and University of Toledo, where he was the director of the Bill J. Priest Center for Community College Education and director of the John H. Russell Center for Educational Leadership, respectively.

“Dr. Katsinas’ work with the release of the new 2010 Carnegie Basic Classification of Associate’s Colleges certainly merits serious consideration by the Blackmon-Moody Award Committee,” said Michael T. Miller, professor of higher education and public policy at the University of Arkansas, in his nomination of Katsinas.  “The Carnegie codes are embedded in every federal data set issued by the U.S. Department of Education, they thus inform scholars, practitioners and policymakers around the United States.That his work is recognized is evidenced by his on-going work with the members of the National Council of State Directors of Community Colleges.”

The nomination letter noted that Katsinas has been quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education more than 30 times since 2005.

“His visibility and involvement is a credit to our discipline,” Miller added.

Katsinas received a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Arts in history and a doctorate in higher education at Southern Illinois University.

The Frederick Moody Blackmon and Sarah McCorkle Moody Outstanding Professor Award is presented annually to a UA faculty member judged to have made extraordinary research contributions that reflect credit on the individual, his or her field of study, and on the University. It was created by Frederick Moody Blackmon of Montgomery to honor the memory of his grandmother, Sarah McCorkle Moody of Tuscaloosa.

“I’m excited to be honored by the Moody family,” Katsinas said. “There’s a lot of great research going on in this College and this University, and I feel privileged to be a part of it. I’m absolutely pleased that so much of this research has involved graduate students.”