Turner Business is pleased to announce that three faculty have been nominated for the 2024 Turner College Faculty Service Award. The first of these is Kirk Heriot, holder of the Turner College's Crowley Chair in Entrepreneurship. Heriot, who joined the Turner College in August of 2007, is currently the faculty sponsor of the Turner College's 2024 Study Abroad program set for Ireland in May. He also sponsors the Turner College's annual Cougar Business Pitch Competition, and is the founding editor of the American Journal of Entrepreneurship. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Heriot co-hosted a "Meet the Editors" roundtable as part of that year's CSU Graduate Research & Writing Boot Camp, while later that same year he delivered a Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) workshop aimed at helping new entrepreneurs and small business owners understand the importance of business strategy.
The second nominee is Fady Mansour, the recently appointed Director of the Butler Center for Research and Economic Development and the current holder of the Sarah T. Butler Chair in the Turner College. Mansour, who joined the Turner College in August of 2017 after a brief tenure at Black Hills State University, was the winner of the Turner College's 2022 Faculty Service Award. As Director of the Butler Center, Mansour played a critical role in the Atlanta Braves minor league franchise's move from Mississippi to Columbus, a project that is expected to generate $260 million in economic activity in the Columbus area during its construction phase, with an additional $6.3 million on a per-year basis going forward.
The third nominee is Jianhua Yang, professor of computer science in the TSYS School. Yang won the 2021 CSU Faculty Research and Scholarship Award, with presenters noting that he had published nine refereed journal articles over the previous five years, while also bringing more than $500,000 in grant funding to CSU. Yang's grant-writing abilities succeeded again during the 2022-2023 academic, when he and other co-investigators were awarded a grant from the National Security Agency (NSA) that positioned the TSYS School to increase awareness of career opportunities in cybersecurity and STEM fields among sixth through eighth-grade girls. The students involved in this program completed a week-long camp in August of 2023, during which they experienced the TSYS School's cyber range, which is a “live-fire” range where students and industry professionals practice live-fire exercises that address over 50,000 versions of malware on an exact replica of a company’s network. As Yang explained, “We hope that through this program, some of our aspiring female technology leaders will be inspired to pursue their education here in Columbus State’s cybersecurity program. This would certainly contribute to advancing women and minorities in the science and technology fields.”
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