Michèle Barmoy Earns Sanner Award for Outstanding Teaching

 

 

BIOLOGY PROFESSOR MICHÈLE BARMOY EARNS OUTSTANDING TEACHING AWARD

CUMBERLAND, Md. (Aug. 18, 2021) – Michèle Barmoy, associate professor of Biology at Allegany College of Maryland, was honored with the Sanner Award for Outstanding Teaching during ACM’s 2021 awards presentation. Barmoy who joined ACM in 2004, was nominated for the award by Steven Heninger, a professor of physics and frequent collaborator and co-teacher. 

"Michèle puts her heart and soul into teaching biology. At first, students are shocked as they expect to get lectured and then be asked to regurgitate memorized facts for a test, but Michèle’s classes don't work that way. She pushes students to engage,” said Heninger.  

Heninger recognized Barmoy’s ongoing efforts to help science and non-science majors succeed, offering multiple examples.  

• Barmoy modernized Biology 101 lectures and labs, and created customized lab manuals in partnership with Joy Friedenbloom, ACM’s lab coordinator. Heninger referred to the six-month long effort as “dragging the course out of the 1970s.” The overhauled course with multiple sections and instructors debuts this fall.  
• Barmoy has prepared “very afraid and often underprepared” students to enter Allied Health programs by readying them to take their Anatomy and Physiology course. “This requires a combination of pushing the students to work harder than they wish, making them think more than they wish, and having sympathy for their difficulties and compassion of their out-of-class problems. Michèle does all of these [duties] admirably as evidenced by the constant stream of students in her office, a number that grows as the semester continues,” said Heninger. 
• She created videos for students to improve their science-specific writing and research. Barmoy trains English faculty, Reading and Writing Center staff and college reference librarians and library assistants in these methodologies. 
• Barmoy spearheaded the creation of the college’s PhageHunters program, securing a two-year grant to incorporate a two-semester lab research sequence in the college’s Bio 101 and 102 courses.
  • ACM is the only community college in Maryland to be part of the international Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA­PHAGES) program. The program is collaboratively taught.
  • Students in Barmoy’s PhageHunters Bio 101 lab learn to:  
    • Collect environmental samples from soil and local streams;  
    • Isolate, purify and characterize bacteriophages from samples; and 
    • Extract phage DNA for sequencing and bioinformatics interpretation.

Additionally, Barmoy is an active member of the Association for Biology Laboratory Education (ABLE) and its regional counterpart, RABLE. She worked in tandem with her ACM colleagues, Joy Freidenbloom and Cynthia Carnahan, to host the 2019 RABLE conference at ACM.  

She is the 35th recipient of the award, which was established by Miriam Sanner, a former ACM Board of Trustees chair and ACM Foundation board member emerita. Barmoy, a Frostburg resident, received a bachelor’s degree from University of Maryland Baltimore County and a master’s degree from Frostburg State University.