By Nadine Randall
University of
Georgia
The Hill Award winners were recognized at a luncheon banquet during the annual Public Service and Outreach Conference today in Athens, Ga. Besides Bower, the Hill Award winners were Scott Brown, John Glisson, William Merka, Richard Milford and Jeffrey Sanford.
The Hill Awards
The Hill Awards, named for former UGA Chancellor Walter B. Hill, recognize distinguished achievement in public service and outreach by faculty members and service professionals.Each recipient is judged to have helped improve the quality of life in Georgia in ways that exceed the normal accomplishments of a faculty member. These improvements can be in program development and management, extension and public service teaching, technical help, applied research or instructional materials.
The award winners get a permanent salary increase and become eligible for appointment as a Hill Fellow. The fellowship, equivalent to a distinguished professorship, is the highest award offered in public service and outreach.
Don Bower
Bower, an associate professor and human development specialist with the College of Family and Consumer Sciences Cooperative Extension Service, received the 2003 Hill Fellow award.Bower has helped CES become the primary provider of parenting education in Georgia. He has overseen the creation of a national model for assessing and credentialing parent educators within the CES system.
His leadership in the Extension Occupant Safety Education Program has helped it become Georgia's main source of information and training in the use of child safety seats and seatbelts.
Bower took the lead, too, in planning the Georgia Family Policy Initiative, which will examine pending policy decisions from a family impact perspective and provide practical recommendations from the research.
Scott Brown
Brown has distinguished himself as a frontrunner in cutting-edge on-farm programming during his UGA public service career.He was the first county extension agent in Georgia and one of the first in the nation to test transgenic Bt cotton on the farm, leading to significant improvements in the state's cotton production, economic efficiency and insecticide use.
John Glisson
Glisson is recognized nationally and internationally for his improvements in the quality of services provided in poultry medicine. His fowl cholera vaccine is the most widely used in the nation, and his VGGA vaccine for Newcastle disease is used in broiler production throughout the world.An outstanding clinical services chief in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine, Glisson was recently named the college's director of public service and outreach.
Bill Merka
Merka is known worldwide as one of the most innovative extension poultry scientists in the field for his work in poultry waste management and minimization.His programs save the poultry industry more than $80 million annually and have improved significantly environmental protection measures.
Richard Milford
Milford has has provided technical assistance to the Georgia Department of Human Resources, the Department of Labor, the Supreme Court of Georgia and other state and local agencies.He has also developed a 10-year partnership between the UGA Carl Vinson Institute of Government and the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education to provide comprehensive evaluation and performance measurement programs in work-force training and development.
Jeffrey Stanford
Sanford has received wide acclaim for helping businesses, teaching business education programs, facilitating economic projects and developing innovative consulting tools with the Business Outreach Services/Small Business Development Center.Since 1999, he has received two grants from the Small Business Administration to start the Federal and State Technology Partnership (FAST) initiative, which provides services to help businesses introduce their technologies into the marketplace.
