Recognizing excellence at 2025 Alumni Awards

Heather Kitada Smalley is a passionate statistics professor. She earned her Ph.D. in statistics from Oregon State in 2018, where she discovered her passion for teaching and for applying data to meaningful problems. Today, she is an Albaugh Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Willamette University, where she helped build the university’s new School of Computing and Information Science, from shaping its curriculum to securing a $2 million Department of Education grant that helped bring the programs to life.

Drawing on her Oregon State experience, Smalley designs classes that are both creative and practical. She uses hands-on learning to help students see how data connects to the real world — showing that statistics isn’t about memorizing equations, but about curiosity and discovery.

Read more about her research and teaching philosophy.

Barbara Han's journey to Oregon State began when Distinguished Emeritus Professor Andy Blaustein, who became her Ph.D. advisor, inspired her while she was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University. Her early fascination with amphibians and their ecosystem has grown into a career conducting groundbreaking work at the intersection of ecology, machine learning and infectious-disease prediction.

Today, Han is an Associate Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, where she develops AI-based tools to forecast when and where zoonotic diseases, those transmitted from animals to humans, may emerge. Her models compare traits of known disease-carrying species with thousands of others to predict which animals might become carriers in the future, helping protect lives, ecosystems and communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her team’s predictions about which mammals could spread the virus were later confirmed in the field.

Learn about she is merging ecology and machine learning.

Eileen ('74, '76) and Norbert Hartmann each grew up in modest circumstances where opportunities in science and higher education were slim. With perseverance and family support, they built lives defined by hard work, service and a deep belief in education as a force for opportunity.

Together the Hartmans have made philanthropy a shared mission. Their generosity to Oregon State includes endowments that support faculty in the College of Science and scholarships in women’s basketball and baseball – investments that reflect their belief in education, access and opportunity for future generations. They have also generously given of themselves as advisors to a succession of College of Science Deans - Eileen just recently rotated off of our Board of Advisors, where she is greatly missed.

Discover their journeys from rural towns to fulfilling careers.

The Distinguished Alumni Award, honoring alumni whose work has had an extraordinary impact on science and society. This year’s recipient, Dr. William Skach ('79), played a pivotal role in research that helped transform care for people living with cystic fibrosis.

Skach graduated from Oregon State with degrees in biochemistry and biophysics and crop science, then earned his M.D. at Harvard Medical School. As a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Oregon Health & Science University, he devoted more than 25 years caring for cancer patients and studying how proteins fold inside the body – research that helped lay the groundwork for treatments that revolutionized cystic fibrosis care.

Read about a breakthrough moment in his career.

Professor of Chemistry Emeritus Joe Nibler has spent his career exploring the invisible world of molecular motion – events that unfold in billionths of a second but define how matter behaves. A fourth-generation Oregonian and proud Oregon State graduate, he helped pioneer Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering, a laser-based technique that made it possible to watch molecules reacting in real time and opened new frontiers in experimental chemistry.

With support from the National Science Foundation, he established Oregon State’s first Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering laboratory, bringing laser tools that allowed scientists to observe how molecules move and react on ultrafast timescales. That ability — to see molecular bonds form and change in real time — transformed how scientists study the fundamental processes that power chemistry, from combustion to biology. His work positioned Oregon State among the early leaders in experimental spectroscopy, training generations of researchers who carried those methods forward.

Joe is also celebrated as a teacher and mentor. He co-authored Experiments in Physical Chemistry, a textbook used by students around the world, and mentored generations of scientists who are now advancing science in universities, companies and research labs across the country.

Find out what Nibler finds most rewarding.