Wei-Chih Chiang

Massomeh Hajilee

Armando Chávez-Rivera

Beverly Tomek

Mark Ward

Qiao Xu

Chang Lee

Saidat Ilo

Nadya Pittendrigh

Ali Dogan

Hashimul Ehsan

Junda Hu

Gen Kaneko

Amjad Nusayr

Daniel White

More than a dozen University of Houston-Victoria faculty members recently were promoted, with five becoming full professors and 10 receiving tenure.

The associate professors promoted to professors are:

• Wei-Chih Chiang, College of Business
• Massomeh Hajilee, College of Business
• Armando Chávez-Rivera, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
• Beverly Tomek, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
• Mark Ward, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences

The assistant professors promoted to associate professors and receiving tenure are:

• Qiao Xu, College of Business
• Chang Lee, College of Education & Health Professions
• Saidat Ilo, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
• Nadya Pittendrigh, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
• Ali Dogan, College of Natural & Applied Science
• Hashimul Ehsan, College of Natural & Applied Science
• Junda Hu, College of Natural & Applied Science
• Gen Kaneko, College of Natural & Applied Science
• Amjad Nusayr, College of Natural & Applied Science
• Daniel White, College of Natural & Applied Science

“The faculty at UHV are dedicated to scholarly and teaching excellence, and these promotions demonstrate their commitment to their field and ensuring that our students receive the highest quality of education,” said Chance Glenn, UHV provost and vice president for academic affairs. “We are proud of the efforts of our faculty, and we look forward to the impact they all are sure to have in their respective fields, the community and our students.”

Chance Glenn

Faculty members hired as assistant professors at UHV are eligible to apply for tenure and promotion to associate professor after six years. Associate professors may be considered for promotion to professor after five years, although distinguished achievements can warrant earlier consideration.

The promotion review process, which takes nearly a year to complete, begins with evaluations by each UHV college’s dean. Their recommendations are sent to the university’s Promotion and Tenure Committee for evaluation. The committee’s recommendation goes to the provost, and his recommendations go up the chain to the university president, UH System chancellor and UH System Board of Regents.

Chiang is the chair of the accounting department for the UHV College of Business; director and audit committee chair for the Global Taiwan Institute; advisor for the Houston Taiwanese School of Languages and Culture; and member of the Texas CPA Society. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. His research is in taxation related to court case analysis and tax policy. He has published approximately 60 articles in a variety of journals and are a mixture of academic and practitioner’s articles. Some of the articles he has published in the past couple of years include “Asymmetric Impact of Corporate Tax on Stock Market Development: Evidence from the nonlinear autoregressive distributed approach,” and “Reasonable Compensation for S Corporation Under Section 199A.”

Hajilee teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on economics and management. Her research is mainly focused on open economy macroeconomics, international economics and international finance. Since joining UHV in 2010, she has had 30 published refereed journal articles in highly respected and high-quality peer-reviewed journals and is working on several manuscripts. She also is involved in the research community in her field and has reviewed more than 160 manuscripts for more than 50 journals in recent years. During her time at UHV, she has been recognized for significantly contributing to the success of students; received the 2020 UHV Research and Scholarly Activity Excellence Award; the 2011-2012 Bloomberg Business Week Research Award; the 2012-2013 UHV Partnership Professor of Economics; and was the recipient of the 2011 UHV School of Business Administration summer research grant. Her professional affiliations in the past several years include the American Economic Association, Eastern Economic Association and the Midwest Economic Association.

Chávez-Rivera teaches undergraduate courses on Spanish language, Hispanic literature and Latin American culture. His research interests have focused on literature, culture and lexicography in the Hispanic world. He recently published the first edition of the first dictionary made by Spanish American intellectuals in Cuba in 1831, which has earned the interest and praise of news agencies and magazines, with informative notes, reviews and interviews. Chávez has twice been a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships to conduct research. He was designated Scholar in Residence by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 2018. He recently became a full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, which is the highest rank and a lifetime recognition reserved for only fifty scholars in the U.S. He also became a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy, the most important institution in the Spanish language world. He has been named as an “Authority” by the National Library of Spain, one of the oldest and most important libraries in Europe and the Hispanic world.

Tomek is the associate provost for curriculum and undergraduate education, where her responsibilities include supervising the Student Success Center and the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, overseeing university-wide initiatives for academic achievement and coordinating assessment of the core curriculum, and more. During her time at UHV, she has taught undergraduate and graduate history courses. Her research has involved race relations in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th century. She has written several books and has presented at several professional events about education and history, including at the Texas Association of College and University Student Personnel Administrators annual meeting, the Pennsylvania Historical Association, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and more. She has been a member of several university committees and is a member of several professional organizations including the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Texas Historical Association, and American Historical Association.

Ward teaches undergraduate courses in organizational, managerial, business and media communication. He has published seven books and his research on American religious popular culture and media and has been published in more than 40 scholarly articles and essays. He is a winner of the Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award, David R. Maines Narrative Research Award, Digital Religion Research Award, and multiple Article of the Year awards from the Religious Communication Association. In 2022 he was named Outstanding Scholar in Communication Theory by the Southern States Communication Association and in 2018 received UHV’s Scholarly Research and Activities Excellence Award. He serves on the Legislative Assembly of the National Communication Association, Executive Council of the Religious Communication Association and Editorial Boards of the Journal of Communication and Religion, Journal of Media and Religion and Women & Language. He is course director for speech and for business and managerial communication. He is a faculty senator for the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences and currently serves on the UHV Strategic Planning Committee and Faculty Salary Committee.

Xu teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in accounting. Her research focuses on auditing, executive compensation, corporate governance and the effect of accounting information on capital markets. She has had several articles published in journals and has presented research at multiple American Accounting Association meetings. She has served on several College of Business committees, including the Policy Review Committee, assessment committee, and student satisfaction committee. She also has served on the Students Evaluation of Teaching Task Force Committee and Faculty Awards Committee and served on the Faculty Senate representing the business college. Xu is a member of the American Accounting Association.

Lee teaches undergraduate kinesiology courses at UHV. His research focuses on the effects of exercise and nutrition on skeletal muscle and its functions. He has more than 30 published works, including journal articles, book chapters and abstracts. He has presented at several national and international conferences, including several of the American College of Sports Medicine annual meetings and several of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology conferences. He also has presented at local seminars and symposiums. Lee has been a member of various university committees, including the Health & Wellness Center committee and Undergraduate Affairs committee, and previously served as a faculty senator from 2019 to 2020 and as chair of the Undergraduate Affairs Committee. He also is a member of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Ilo teaches undergraduate political science courses. Her research interests include international relations, American government, African politics and international political economy, although her research has generally centered on the continent of Africa south of the Sahara and its relationship with governmental and nongovernmental institutions. She has had several works published, including articles and reviews. She has presented at several international, national and local conferences for several years, including the Southern Political Science Association summer meeting, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists annual conference, the African Studies Association annual meeting, the African Heritage Studies Association’s 50th annual conference, and the Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies’ Decolonizing Conference. At UHV, she is a member of committees including the Faculty Awards committee and the Scholarship Oversight committee.

Pittendrigh is the director of English at UHV and teaches mostly undergraduate English courses. Her research has focused on the rhetoric of punishment, prisons and prisoners. She has used insights from studying the rhetoric we use to justify punishment to challenge and improve our assumptions about teaching, persuasion, and argumentation. She has published poetry, reviews, academic articles and more and has presented her work at more than a dozen national, regional and local conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Rhetoric Society of America, the College English Association conference, the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, and more. She is a member of the Rhetoric Society of America, the National Council of Teachers of English, the College English Association, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Dogan teaches undergraduate and graduate mathematics courses at UHV. His research focuses on combinatorics and graph theory. He has had several articles published in respected journals, including the Journal of Graph Theory; Hacettepe Journal of Mathematics and Statistics; International Journal of Assessment and Evaluation; and the International Mathematical Forum. Dogan has served on many UHV committees and has co-organized several university events and activities. During his time at UHV, he has served as the director of the Applied Arts & Sciences program and coordinated the General Studies program. He is a current member of the Core Curriculum committee and Graduate Studies committee.

Ehsan is the director of the UHV Master of Science in biomedical science program and has taught undergraduate and graduate biology courses. The focus of his research is based on molecular and biochemical control of the cell cycle and related processes toward the cell death from cancer cells to plant cells. He has had many academic articles published in peer-reviewed research publications and has presented his work at several national and regional conferences and seminars, including the Next Generation RNA-Sequences workshop and the Texas Undergraduate Research Conference at UT. Ehsan has served as coordinator for labs, and as an organizer and member in various university committees and events, including the Faculty Search committee and the University Task Force. He also serves as a thesis advisor.

Hu teaches undergraduate and graduate mathematics courses at UHV. His main research interests consist of number theory, where he explores statistical aspects of various problems in number theory. His other research interest is computational methods in bioinformatics, of which he has studied computational problems in bioinformatics such as protein–protein interaction, drug-target interaction, and protein functional sites prediction. His work has been published in several academic journals, including the Journal of BioMed Research International; International Journal of Number Theory; Journal of Current Bioinformatics; and Protein & Peptide Letters. He has presented at national and regional conferences, including at the Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory Conference in New York, and the 2018 CombinaTexas conference. Hu recently was recognized by UHV students as a faculty member who significantly contributed to their success. He also has served on various university committees and has been the secretary of the Phi Kappa Phi honor society UHV chapter since 2016.

Kaneko teaches various undergraduate and graduate biology courses. His research is on evolutionary research with a focus on finding out the diversity of metabolism. He has published more than 50 papers during his time at UHV, including “The complex evolution of the metazoan HSP70 gene family,” and “Forkhead transcription factor 01 in torafugu pufferfish Takifugu rubripes: Molecular cloning, in vitro DNA binding, and target gene screening in fish metagenome.” He has served on several UHV committees, including the Faculty Awards Committee, several search committees and several thesis evaluation committees.

Nusayr is the director of the UHV Bachelor of Science in computer science program and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science and computer information systems. His research is in software engineering and programming languages, with his most recent research focusing on improving the performance for recommendation and prediction systems. His work and research has appeared in several publications, and he has presented his research at international, national and regional conferences and workshops, including the 2019 Latin American Robotics Symposium and the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering. Nusayr is chair of the UHV Robotics committee and a member of the UHV parking committee.

White is the program coordinator for the biology and chemistry programs at UHV and teaches undergraduate biology and graduate biomedical sciences courses. His primary research is focused on how the brain controls the cardiovascular system, and he runs the cardiovascular lab at the university. His cardiovascular work has been published and presented at national conferences, and his students also have presented at local conferences including the annual UHV Biology Appreciation Day each spring. White serves as the vice president of the UHV Faculty Senate, and serves on a variety of university committees, including the Long-Range Strategic Planning committee, UHV Technology Advisory committee, and more. He is a member of the American Physiological Society, the American College of Sports Medicine, the Texas Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. White is a native of Victoria and a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.