Individual Award

Jill Zarestky – School of Education

Dr. Jill Zarestky has received the Interdisciplinary Scholarship Award for her impressively broad scope of work in adult education, program design, and program assessment. She has successfully integrated research methodologies and perspectives from many disciplines, serving as a bridge across campus and adding significant value and impact through enhanced partnerships. Notably, her collaborative network spans an exceptional 26 departments across all 8 colleges at CSU, including collaborations with over 30 different groups. She is often described as embodying true interdisciplinary collaborative engagement and co-creation, making connections and elevating the quality of her teams such that others at CSU are doing better work because of their collaborations with Dr. Zarestky. Her work translates academic research into practical applications through ongoing Extension partnerships, bridging the gap between theory and practice, with an exceptional record of interdisciplinary outreach to improve communication and educational outcomes across the state. She demonstrates deep interdisciplinary integration by consistently publishing well-cited articles and securing funding in collaboration with researchers from diverse fields beyond her primary expertise. Her interdisciplinarity is represented by diverse funding sources including NSF (fundamental science), USDA (applied agriculture), DOE (energy and environment), and various philanthropic foundations. These substantial funding awards, totaling over $28M with over $5.5M as PI/Co-PI, are directly attributable to her interdisciplinary research initiatives and showcase her versatility.

Team Award

Alyssia Miller De Rutté, Shannon Zeller, Maite Correa, Nyssa Knarvik, Edward Sarasty, and Maura Velázquez-Castillo – Languages, Literatures and Cultures

The six members of the Center for LSP Education and Research (CLEaR) team were selected for the Interdisciplinary Scholarship Award based on their strong foundation of scholarship and academic programs, through Languages for Specific Purposes and Spanish for Specific Purposes, which addresses critical communication barriers in professional settings. Their work is highly interdisciplinary in nature, supporting important cross-college interactions and scholarship that is very relevant to the people of Colorado and CSU, including stakeholders and partners from Veterinary Medicine, Animal Science, Computer Science, English, Extension, CSU Police Department, the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and many others. Their team integrates linguistics (language needs analysis) with professional fields (livestock, veterinary medicine, healthcare, criminal justice), and they apply a wide application of interdisciplinary language analysis methodologies to practical, cross-cultural communication challenges. By combining expertise from languages, literatures, and cultures with specific industry knowledge, this team has demonstrated broad impact across diverse fields. Their scholarship exemplifies the essence of collaborative, interdisciplinary research that not only contributes substantially to academic knowledge but also to practical solutions for real-world challenges. The team’s recent book project, Spanish for Specific Purposes in the U.S.: From Language Needs Analysis to Evidence-Based Curricular Design and Implementation, is based on a shared conceptual framework and methodology, and further demonstrates their strong interdisciplinary integration of knowledge and experience to advance fundamental research across multiple disciplines to have significant impact on the quality of communication and professional practice.