Josh Brokaw – colleague in the ACU Biology Department. I had been struggling on and off for a few years to publish a chapter from my dissertation. In the summer of 2012, I submitted a manuscript to the journal Systematic and Applied Microbiology in which the editor requested a revised manuscript. The requested revisions pertained to systematics and were absolutely impossible for me to do alone. My previous collaborator on this portion was overwhelmed with other projects and not particularly interested in pursuing this. I knew Josh was an expert in systematics, though not bacterial, and thought he might be willing to help me. Josh looked at my data and reconstructed all of the analyses to the satisfaction of the editor. He invested a lot of time in this project. We were able to collaborate and create a manuscript that was so much better than the one I had initially submitted to the journal. As I mentioned before, I had been working on this manuscript sporadically for several years, never quite able to produce on paper what I envisioned in my head. The manuscript was exactly what I had hoped it would be. Josh wrote this letter of recommendation as a research collaborator and as a colleague commenting on my collegiality.
James Campbell – faculty member at Northwest Missouri State University in the Department of Natural Sciences. I met Jim when we were graduate students in the same lab at Texas Tech University. We taught together in microbiology labs and taught each other lab techniques. We stayed in touch throughout our postdoctoral research fellowships (Jim at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and me at the University of Georgia), where we coincidentally worked on similar research that was completely unrelated to our graduate work. Jim now teaches microbiology in Missouri and we often collaborate on microbiology teaching problems and have a small research collaboration planned. Jim is qualified to comment on my research.
Mikee Delony – faculty member at ACU in the Language and Literature Department and Co-sponsor of Alpha Chi National Honor Society. Mikee invited me to help her co-sponsor ACU’s chapter Alpha Chi. She comments on my service to this organization.
Tom Lee – chairman of the ACU Biology Department. Tom wrote this letter of support after my pre-tenure review.
James Thompson – elder at University Church of Christ. James and his wife, Carolyn, were among the first people that I met when I moved to Abilene. They have shown great hospitality to my family and have given me constant encouragement over the past five years. James wrote this letter to comment on my service to the church.