Kevin Hamed

As we break for the Thanksgiving holidays, Virginia’s Community Colleges are proud to learn that one of our faculty members was presented with the 2009 Virginia Professor of the Year award from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Kevin Hamed, assistant professor of biology at Virginia Highlands Community College, received the award last week, based on extraordinary dedication to undergraduate teaching.

Hamed said the honor was “almost” as good as the pleasure he gets working with students and introducing them to his other great loves, biology and salamanders. 

“Really the true honor is being able to work with these students,”

Hamed told the Bristol Herald Courier. He focuses on hands-on, “real world” work that gets students into the field – into the woods and creeks of southwest Virginia as well as all the way to the Gulf Coast over spring break.

An expert on Appalachian salamanders, he has led students to the top of Whitetop Mountain for salamander hunts, part of his research to track salamander populations. For his use of GPS technology, dataloggers, tracking tags and other equipment, he won an Innovative Use of Technology Award in 2008 from the Virginia Community College System’s New Horizons Conference.

His competition for the award included community college faculty as well as four-year undergraduate faculty from across Virginia. A resident of Bristol, he has been with VHCC since 2003 after eight years as nature center manager at Steele Creek Park in Bristol, Tennessee.

Congratulations all around.

–posted by Susan Hayden