Virginia Highlands professor receives Virginia Professor of the Year award

ABINGDON, Va. – A professor at Virginia Highlands Community College has received a prestigious award as Virginia Professor of the Year.
Kevin Hamed, an assistant professor of biology, was presented with this year’s award Thursday by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Washington, D.C. The award recognizes extraordinary dedication to undergraduate teaching.

“It’s a great honor, and it’s almost as good as being able to work with the students I get to work with every day,” Hamed, of Bristol, Tenn., said Thursday. “Really the true honor is being able to work with these students, but being recognized for it is nice as well.”

Hamed’s focus in the classroom is hands-on “real-world work” that gets students out of the lecture hall and into the field.

“They’re trying to answer real questions opposed to just learning factual information from books,” said Hamed, who routinely takes his biology students into the woods and creeks of Southwest Virginia and leads a weeklong ecology course on the Gulf Coast over spring break.

“The idea is kind of going out against the traditional mold and getting students out in the field where they can actually apply what we have learned and actually see the value of it,” he said.

David Wilkin, president of VHCC, said the enthusiasm Hamed generates among his students is “exciting to behold.”

“The students just really get involved in what they’re doing,” Wilkin said. “Lots of them, based on their experiences and their new enthusiasm, they go on to study biology and related fields when they transfer on to universities. And some of them have a life-changing experience in his class.”

Wilkin said Hamed’s competition for the award included other professors from around the state at four-year colleges as well as community colleges and “for a faculty member it’s probably the top recognition you could possibly get.”

Hamed joined the Virginia Highlands faculty in 2003 after eight years as nature center manager at Steele Creek Park in Bristol, Tenn.

A graduate of Tennessee Technical University and East Tennessee State University, Hamed is pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Tennessee while teaching and continuing his research on salamanders.

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