Barbara Gray, professor of organizational behavior and director of the Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation, Smeal College of Business Administration, and Anatole Katok, the Raymond N. Shibley Professor of Mathematics, Eberly College of Science, are the recipients of the Graduate Faculty Teaching Award. The Graduate Faculty Teaching Award honors tenured faculty members who have excelled both in teaching at the graduate level and in supervising thesis work of graduate students.  

As a teacher of graduate courses, Gray stresses three core components: self-reflection, perspective taking and developing competencies.  She has designed all the courses that she now teaches, among them a required doctoral seminar in qualitative research methods. Welcoming doctoral students as partners in learning, she has published 21 articles with current or former doctoral students and has 11 more in preparation or under review. Two of the dissertations she supervised received awards -- one from the Academy of Management and the other from the Academy of International Business. 

With MBA students, her academic specialties are teaching teamwork and team leadership skills, negotiation and conflict management strategies and management of diversity. Former students praise her knowledge, enthusiasm, willingness to listen and ability to teach those skills necessary to deal successfully not only with the intricacies of the business world but with life as a whole.

A teacher at Penn State since 1990, Katok has been adviser to 9 successful doctoral candidates, 6 who now hold academic appointments, and is currently advising 4 more. Among the Ph.D. candidates whom he advised before coming to Penn State are well-known mathematicians holding full professorships at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland, Penn State and Moscow State University.

Katok played a key role in organizing Penn State's Mathematical Advanced Study Semester (MASS) program, which assembles undergraduate math majors from all over the country for a one semester special lecture series. Many of these students have gone on to excellent graduate schools. In collaboration with Tufts University professor Boris Hasselblatt, a former student, Katok wrote the monograph, "Introduction to the Modern Theory of Dynamical Systems," which has seen five reprints in less than five years. A departmental colleague notes, "There are few mathematicians in the world who put into graduate teaching, advising and mentoring as much talent, energy and dedication as does Professor Anatole Katok."