Two UMass Amherst Professors Receive 2005 President’s Public Service Awards

Oct. 3, 2005

Contact:

Ed Blaguszewski 413/545-0444

AMHERST, Mass. – Nancy Cohen, professor and department head of nutrition, and Thomas Roeper, professor of linguistics, have been named recipients of the 2005 President’s Public Service Awards at the University of Massachusetts.

The awards will be presented by UMass President by Jack M. Wilson later this fall in Boston.

Cohen is described by her colleagues as a role model who strives to create synergies between teaching, research and public service. Since taking over the nutrition department in 1998, Cohen has made a conscious effort to promote outreach and has earned a national reputation for her ability to bring theory and research into the public domain in a clear, concise and easily understood manner.

As one of the founders of the Massachusetts Partnership for Food Safety Education, a coalition of federal, state and community agencies, she has become a recognized source in disseminating food safety messages throughout the Commonwealth.

Roeper has earned both a national and international reputation for his groundbreaking work on a language assessment instrument for language disorders, the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV). His work goes to the heart of the testing dilemma by focusing on the deep principles of language and addressing the biases in sampling, content and language.

His pioneering work seeks to standardize speech and language tests that are linguistically and culturally fair to children who speak a variation of mainstream American English known as African-American English. The focus of Roeper’s work has stressed the importance of making a distinction between dialects and disorders. His efforts to explain the need for dialect-sensitive assessment tools has been instrumental in changing the way speech and language pathologists go about their work.

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