2017 OTICA: Erin Blankenship

Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award (OTICA.) Erin E. Blankenship, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics and Associate Dean, College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Through research and teaching, Blankenship is making students’ classroom experience more engaging. Since joining UNL in 1999, she has placed a high priority on students by improving not only her own teaching methods, but making her colleagues better teachers in the process. Blankenship has developed or co-developed eight courses at the university. “The American Statistician” published her research about modernizing undergraduate statistics curriculum in 2015. Her involvement in Math in the Middle, a National Science Foundation-sponsored math-science partnership, changed the teaching of statistics at the K-12 level. Math in the Middle has been effective in teaching math educators statewide how to engage students and bring creativity and critical thinking to the field of statistics. Her consistently positive course evaluations support her dedication to a student-centered approach in the classroom. She has received many teaching honors, including Mu Sigma Rho’s William D. Warde Statistics Education Award, a national honor recognizing lifetime achievement in statistics education, and she is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.