FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (8/04)
Contact: Lynn Stewart, Centenary News Service, 318-869-5120

Centenary College Promotes Three Outstanding Scholars to Rank of Full Professor

SHREVEPORT, LA — Three associate professors at Centenary College of Louisiana will begin the 2004-05 academic year with new titles, having been recognized for their outstanding teaching, scholarship and service with promotions to the rank of full professor.

They are Dr. Mary Barrett of the Department of Geology, Dr. Dana Kress of the Department of Ancient and Modern Languages, and Dr. Juan Rodriguez of the Department of Physics.

A member of the Centenary faculty since 1992, Dr. Barrett is an authority in the area of environmental geology. She uses her expertise to do research on the history and ecology of oil fields, focusing of the effects of saltwater waste. She is a former chairman of Centenary's Economic Policy Committee and she serves as an officer of the American Association of Professional Geologists. She earned B.S. (1978) and M.S. (1980) degrees from Stephen F. Austin State University and a Ph.D. (1987) from Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Kress, professor of French and chair of the Department of Ancient and Modern Languages, has also been a Centenary faculty member since 1992. He and his students started the French-language newspaper Le Tintamarre, still the only such newspaper edited by students in the United States. His recent scholarship has focused on recovering old and rare French-language manuscripts that were written and published in Louisiana during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dr. Kress is a former Louisiana Professor of the Year and a former president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. As CODOFIL president, he helped draft a treaty with France that allows any student from Louisiana to study in any university in France. He earned a B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1985) from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. (1992) from Vanderbilt University.

A Centenary faculty member since 1990, Dr. Rodriguez developed the major in biophysics at Centenary. He has used his knowledge of optics to develop groundbreaking methods of using light to probe the brain and to unravel the chemistry of nitric oxide in living tissues. He is the author of three chapters in a handbook of biomedical diagnostics and of recent articles on nitric oxide in prestigious journals such as Nature-Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Rodriguez, who currently holds the Wortham Chair of Engineering, is a former chairman of the Physics Department and the Natural Sciences Division at Centenary, as well as a former member of the Faculty Coordinating Committee. He developed and shaped a summer internship program with the LSU Health Sciences Center. He earned a B.S (1980) from Centenary, a Ph.D. (1986) from the University of Arkansas, and received postdoctoral training at Washington University (St. Louis) from 1986 to 1990.

The promotions were approved by the Centenary Board of Trustees at its final meeting of the 2003-04 academic year.

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