Martha Bishop, Lab Coordinator in Environmental and Plant Biology, has been been chosen to receive the University Outstanding Administrator Award. She will be honored at a ceremony on March 10.
Read more about the ceremony in Compass.
Martha Bishop, Environmental and Plant Biology Department
Only three outstanding administrators are honored each year across the Athens and Regional campuses. Bishop and two others are honored on Monday, March 10, at the annual Outstanding Administrator and Administrative Service Awards Ceremony at 3 p.m. in the Baker University Center Ballroom.
“Martha is in good company as Connie Pollard, Departmental Administrator, and Harold Blazier, Greenhouse Manager, have previously won the award,” says Dr. Morgan L. Vis, Professor & Chair of Environmental & Plant Biology. “Our department is truly lucky to have such talented and dedicated staff.”
As laboratory coordinator, Bishop manages Plant Biology lab classrooms and two stockrooms. She prepares, sets up, takes down and cleans all the materials needed teaching multiple sections of labs. In Plant Biology, this includes includes mixing chemical solutions, culturing and maintaining living plants, protists, fungi, and bacteria, and field collecting and preserving plant, fungal, cyanobacterial, and algal specimens. She also supports teaching assistants and lab instructors while the labs are in progress.
Bishop maintains and ensures safe handling of chemicals and operates the water distilling unit.
Training faculty, graduate students, and student workers in safe and proper operation of all teaching equipment in the labs is part of her role. She also oversees the storage, maintenance and repair of scientific teaching equipment including compound, dissecting, and fluorescence microscopes, balances, centrifuges, pH meters, spectrophotometers, transilluminator, gel electrophoresis and protein gel equipment, thermalcycler, gene gun, pipetors, incubators, shakers, refrigerators, microwaves, and IT equipment.
“I strive to create an environment for students and teachers that allows them to attend to the work at hand in a safe, clean and efficient way. I try to be available throughout the day to troubleshoot emergencies arising in the labs and in the building. I have been very pleased with comments of professionals visiting from other
departments and other universities that very favorably compare the condition and organization of our teaching labs to those they have experienced elsewhere. Also when graduate students have started their careers at other colleges they have contacted me for advice in setting up their own labs. They have remarked that they never realized how much work went in to preparing for operating teaching labs, and just how good our organization here is, until they were faced with having to search for supplies and protocols that were not as readily accessible,” Bishop says.
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