Four Missouri University of Science and Technology staff members were honored today for their leadership, strategic vision and efforts to implement the university’s strategic plan, “Rising to the Challenge: Missouri S&T’s Strategy for Success.”

Chancellor Cheryl B. Schrader announced the first-ever awardees of the Chancellor’s Challenge Awards during the second day of an event designed to inform the Missouri S&T community about the campus’ strategic planning efforts.

The winners are:

•    Ted Ruth, director of design and construction management, and Emily Petersen, space planning analyst, for their efforts to integrate the campus master plan into the strategic plan.

•    Tracy Primich, director of the Curtis Laws Wilson Library, and Greg Smith, chief information officer, for their work to create a learning commons for Missouri S&T students, faculty and staff.

“The entire Missouri S&T community is to be congratulated for its efforts to implement this plan, which is garnering unprecedented resources and is being held up as a national model,” Schrader says. “These individuals in particular have gone above and beyond in implementing our plan. They are truly champions in my book.”

Ruth and Petersen were recognized for their work in updating the campus master plan, which will shape the Missouri S&T campus for the next 20 to 25 years. In developing the plan, Ruth and Petersen led efforts to gather input from many stakeholders and drafted a blueprint for the campus’s future that ties in to Missouri S&T’s strategic goals, such as raising visibility and increasing meaningful interaction within the university community.

Ruth and Petersen began with a comprehensive space study and have incorporated an implementation plan to resize and repurpose existing space.

Primich and Smith were honored for their initiative to come up with an idea outside the box, observe how it fit with the strategic plan and implement it. The Visualization Wall at Curtis Laws Wilson Library was engineered and constructed by the S&T Research Support Services earlier this year.

The wall, 144.5 inches wide, is made up of nine tiles that are thin, energy-efficient flat-screen monitors. The collaborative learning space is one of many transformations to the library in the past year. In addition, furniture has been added to encourage collaboration, and 3-D printers and other technologies are now available in a central learning hub.

Missouri S&T is in the second year of implementing its strategic plan, which was completed after a comprehensive process involving thousands of students, alumni, faculty, staff and other university constituents. The plan demonstrates Missouri S&T’s commitment to providing a strong return on investment to its students and other key stakeholders.

More information about Missouri S&T’s strategic plan is available online at strategicplan.mst.edu.