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The Student Organization for Alumni Relations has announced the 2001 teaching award recipients of the 40th Annual Teaching Recognition Awards at CU-Boulder. Presented each spring since 1962, SOAR's Teaching Recognition Awards honor faculty members who excel in the classroom. The SOAR awards are the only faculty honors in which the selection and administration is done by CU-Boulder undergraduate students. Awarded in four class-size categories, each winner receives $1,500 from the CU Parents Association and the Alumni Association's Directors Club.

Beyond its core focus of supporting CU-Boulder's five foreign language departments on campus, CU-Boulder's Anderson Language Technology Center has existing outreach programs and several new ones planned for fall 2001 to expose Coloradans to foreign language offerings not widely available in Colorado. ALTEC Director Kuan-Yi Rose Chang believes the CU programs will help schools throughout the state improve their foreign language instruction and help the state gradually expand foreign language offerings in public schools.

Taiwan native Kuan-Yi Rose Chang is on a mission to broaden the cultural awareness and foreign language skills of University of Colorado students and Coloradans. An adjunct professor of Spanish and Chinese and director of CU-Boulder's Anderson Language Technology Center (ALTEC), Chang believes that globalization and the rapid growth of minority populations in the United States increasingly demands that Americans broaden their understanding of other cultures. Part of the broadening process also should include expanding Americans' foreign language skills, she says.

Chancellor Richard Byyny has announced that 18 new Boettcher Scholars have chosen to attend the University of Colorado at Boulder next fall, ranking CU-Boulder as the top school in Colorado, public or private, for attracting new Boettcher Scholars.

Science Discovery at the University of Colorado and the CU Museum of Natural History will provide hands-on activities as part of the Pueblo Zoo's "Dinosaur Day" on Saturday, May 12, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The program will be presented regardless of the weather. Other presenters include the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and Canon City's Dinosaur Depot.

CU-Boulder Professor Naomi Soderstrom is teaching an innovative approach to accounting that has threefold benefits: it saves companies money, reduces environmental degradation and makes students more effective accountants.

University of Colorado at Boulder doctoral student Jennifer Kugel is one of 13 students from around the nation selected to receive the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award in 2001. Sponsored by the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the award is given to top students at or near the completion of their studies in the biological sciences.

The Office of Diversity and Equity at the University of Colorado at Boulder awarded seven faculty, staff and students the 2001 Equity and Excellence Award last week at the 16th Annual Equity and Excellence Awards Banquet and Graduation Ceremony. Two awards of distinction also were presented in the graduate and undergraduate student categories.

Recent discoveries about the universe and its evolution will be the topic of "The Big Bang," a live show at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Fiske Planetarium on Friday, May 18, and Tuesday, May 22, at 7:30 p.m. CU-Boulder Professor Andrew Hamilton will take the planetarium audience on a trip back in time to learn about the "big bang" and how the Milky Way and its stars were formed. The term big bang refers to the theory that the universe began at a single point in space and has been expanding ever since.

Four University of Colorado at Boulder students are recipients of the second annual Western American Writing Awards presented by the Center of the American West. Each of the students received $350 at an awards banquet on April 25. CU-Boulder professors from eight academic departments and three colleges judged the entries. The judges had such difficulty in deciding among the 94 entries that they also awarded three honorable mention awards of $25 each.