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Millspaugh earns USDA National Teaching Award

Joshua Millspaugh, associate professor and director of graduate studies in fisheries and wildlife, was one of two educators nationally honored with the 2008 United States Department of Agriculture Food and Agricultural Sciences Excellence in College and University Teaching Award. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the USDA for university-level achievement.

The award, sponsored by the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, comes with a stipend and plaque and an invitation to address more than 1,000 presidents, chancellors and other top administrators from American public research universities and land-grant colleges at the USDA Board of Agriculture Assembly in November.

Millspaugh earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1999. He teaches quantitative ecology, wildlife stress physiology, and ecology and management of large mammals.

His research involves undergraduate and graduate students and focuses on the movements, habitat choices and stress physiology of wildlife, particularly large animals such as elephants, bison and elk. His research has been featured on the NBC Today Show, Animal Plant and the History Channel, in addition to hundreds of newspapers including the New York Times and USA Today.

To date, he has published three books and more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, and has co-authored approximately 20 interactive workshops about active learning strategies.

His current graduate student projects include black-backed woodpecker demographics and nest site selection in the Black Hills, South Dakota. He is also involved in the modeling of wildlife response to forest management activities, assessing non-invasive stress measures in African herbivores. He recently retuned from South Dakota and Montana where he is studying the black-footed ferret, once considered North America’s most endangered mammal.

He is also collaborating with Rob Slotow, Ph.D., at the University of KwaZulu-Natal to assess how ecotourism impacts elephant stress and behavior.

Millspaugh previously received the MU Provost Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award, the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, the Outstanding Faculty Member Award from the School of Natural Resources Student Council and numerous other teaching awards.

Founded in 1887, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges is an association of public research universities, land-grant institutions and state university systems. Its members enroll more than 3.55 million students, award approximately a half-million degrees annually and have an estimated 20 million alumni.

Mark Ryan, director of the School of Natural Resources and William J. Rucker Professor of Wildlife Conservation Curator's Teaching Professor, received the national USDA award in 2001. Rex Campbell, professor of rural sociology, earned a regional award in 1998.

Posted Nov. 20, 2008