Four Faculty Selected to Receive Professional Achievement Honors

May 23, 2024
Steve Perez, President

Please join me in congratulating the 2024 recipients of the University’s Professional Achievement Honors, sponsored by the University Foundation Board of Governors. These awards recognize exemplary teacher-scholar achievement on our campus and this year’s honorees are prime examples of the wonderful work done at Chico State:

• Tatevik Avetisyan Artoonian, Agriculture – Tatevik joined Chico State in 2020 and has already made an incredible impact. She is a principal investigator exploring California food hubs and assessing Northern Californians’ willingness to pay for local food. She also is exploring farmers’ willingness to adopt regenerative agriculture practices. She has presented her research at global conferences from Zambia to Germany and Texas to Florida. Closer to home, she chairs FFA student marketing contests and serves as president of the North America Chapter of the IFAMA Young Professionals Network. Of note, the teams she mentors have placed in the top three multiple times at national conferences.
• Emily Fleming, Biological Sciences – Emily is a mentor to both undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom have adopted her research area of interest. Her expertise is with rust-producing bacteria, which is what causes biofouling, causing corrosion on surfaces like ship hulls or material buildup that slows the flow rate in pipes. She has been published in many journals, including one of the globe’s leading microbiology journals, and has a multi-year collaborative grant through the National Science Foundation.
• Matthew Meuter, Marketing – Matthew has been on the ground floor studying the intersections of technology and marketing for nearly three decades and is a highly respected expert in his field. He conducts research on everything from self-service technologies to comfort brands to social media. He’s just beginning to explore the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence and its influence on businesses and customers. Matthew has been cited in more than 11,000 journal articles. He is a faculty research fellow with the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University and serves on the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Services Marketing.
• Lindsey Nenadal, Child Development – Lindsey’s research explores teachers’ beliefs about biases based on social class, the effects of poverty on child development, and how to address the trauma children face after a wildfire. The latter is where she has really started to stand out. She worked with the Boys and Girls Clubs and Chico State students to develop a handbook for organizations that support families after natural disasters with short- and long-term needs, and is currently working on two new studies that will ultimately empower today’s survivors and help those who we know will inevitably face disasters in the future. Her expertise was called upon after last year’s Maui wildfires and is becoming more relevant by the year.

Thank you to the University’s Faculty Recognition and Support Committee who had the challenge of selecting our recipients. Congratulations to the recipients, and thank you for the extraordinary teaching and research you do.