University of Richmond

Richmond, Virginia

Dr. Lynn Pelco

Dr Lynn E. Pelco is professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University and a visiting scholar in the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. For the past decade, Dr. Pelco served as the associate vice provost for community engagement at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and held an affiliate faculty appointment in the VCU School of Education. While at VCU, Dr. Pelco directed the Service-Learning Office and the ASPiRE Living-Learning Program and served as interim director for faculty development in the Provost’s Office. In those roles, Dr. Pelco led strategic initiatives to create programs and curricula that supported student civic learning and engagement as well as faculty development and mentoring. She recently partnered with the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV) to develop faculty resources for deepening campus civic engagement and to assess the impacts of statewide policy that expands civic engagement in Virginia’s public higher education sector. Dr. Pelco earned her Ph.D. in school psychology from the Pennsylvania State University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental disabilities at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Shital Thekdi

Shital Thekdi is an Associate Professor of Analytics & Operations in the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond. She has earned a Ph.D. in Systems & Information Engineering at the University of Virginia; and has earned an M.S.E. and B.S.E. in Industrial & Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. She teaches courses in analytics and decision-making. Her research focuses on risk analysis and management in operations.

Dr. Todd Lookingbill

Dr. Todd Lookingbill is an Associate Professor and Chair of Geography and the Environment with a joint appointment in Biology at the University of Richmond. He is a landscape ecologist whose research and teaching interests include developing more inclusive approaches to engaging with the natural resources found in urban and suburban parks. Related research examines how changes in climate are fundamentally altering old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest and increasing the urban heat island effect in Richmond’s historically black neighborhoods. His work has been recognized with awards of distinction by the International Association of Landscape Ecology-North America Chapter, the Southeast Division of the Association of American Geographers, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and the National Park Service’s Center for Urban Ecology. He is active in watershed and land stewardship and has served on more than a dozen working groups and advisory committees for the Commonwealth of Virginia, City of Richmond, and University of Richmond.

Faculty Fellow RoleS

As part of this fellowship, the faculty members, each tenured practitioners of community engaged scholarship and teaching, will work with the CCE’s staff to draft a “toolkit” that will serve as a resource to support conversations about community-engaged scholarship and teaching between faculty and “evaluators” (department chairs, colleagues, tenure and promotion committees, deans, etc) at various stages of their professional trajectory. The faculty’s experiences and knowledge will be essential in crafting the tone, content, and format of the toolkit. They will start with the brainstorming and outlining of said document and then take on particular sections to write. Moreover, the faculty fellows will be specifically asked to consider this document through their particular disciplinary lens to make sure that the document is both useful but not proscriptive, leaving room for disciplinary expertise and tradition. At the end of the spring semester, after the draft of the toolkit had been created, the faculty fellows will design and implement a half-day workshop surrounding the toolkit.