(Posted May 27, 2014)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Five members of the Juniata College faculty received promotions in the 2013-2014 academic year at a recent Juniata College Board of Trustees meeting. The faculty members will assume their new titles at the start of the 2014-2015 academic year.

Mark McKellop, associate professor of psychology, was promoted to full professor; Neil Pelkey, associate professor of environmental science, was promoted to full professor; and James Tuten, associate professor of history, was promoted to full professor.

Wade Roberts, assistant professor of philosophy, was promoted to associate professor, and John Wright, assistant professor of information technology and computer science, was promoted to associate professor.


Mark McKellop, a resident of Huntingdon, joined the Juniata faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor of psychology. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Ohio State University in 1994. He earned a master's degree in clinical child psychology in 1996 and a doctorate in clinical child psychology in 2000, both from the University of Cincinnati.


He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1985 to 1992, working as a meteorologist and a training instructor. His research interests include stress, coping and resilience in children and adolescents, health psychology and gender influences on child development.


He received the 2008 Gibbel Award for Distinguished Teaching. He also was promoted to associate professor in 2008. He has taught courses in abnormal psychology, behavior disorders in children and adolescents, popular media portrayals of psychologists and mental disorders, child and adolescent development and the psychology of personality.


McKellop was a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. from 2001 to 2002. He also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio from 2000 to 2001.


His research has been published in academic journals such as "Child Neuropsychology" and the "Journal of Pediatric Psychology."

Neil Pelkey, a resident of Huntingdon, joined the Juniata College faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor of environmental science and information technology. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from the University of California-Davis and went on to earn a doctorate in ecology from the same institution. He has taught courses in environmental science and engineering, stream channel mapping, spatial statistics, animal ecology and GIS and remote sensing.


He was promoted to associate professor in 2008.


He started his academic career as a postdoctoral researcher at UC-Davis, where he studied collaborative governance of more than 70 watersheds in California and Washington.


He started a Juniata study abroad program in marine science in India in 2005. He also has an extensive research career in India, where he researched human-elephant interaction in a wildlife preserve for his doctoral research. He co-founded and is on the board of directors of the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning, an Indian scientific research organization that funds ecological research for young science researchers.


Pelkey has published scholarly articles in such journals as "Water Resources Planning and Management," "Biological Conservation," "African Journal of Ecology" and "Conservation Biology." He has received research grants from such agencies as the World Bank, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.


James Tuten, a resident of Huntingdon, came to Juniata in 1998 from Emory University. He earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts and United States history in 1990 from the College of Charleston in South Carolina and went on to earn a master's degree in history in 1992 from Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He earned a doctoral degree in history in 2003 from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.


His research interests include the history of southern rice culture from the Civil War until the industry collapsed in the 1920s. He also is researching the life and career of Confederate General E.W. Gantt. Tuten published "Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Collapse of the Rice Kingdom" in 2010 and has published numerous opinion pieces in national and regional newspapers, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education and the Christian Science Monitor.


He served as an instructor in history at Juniata from 1998 to 2000 and was the college's assistant provost from 2001 to 2006. He was promoted to associate professor in 2008. He also was a teaching associate at Emory from 1994 to 1996. He teaches courses on the History of Food, New South, The United States Since 1945, and Civil War and Reconstruction. He has published articles on madeira wine, most notably in the journal "American Nineteenth Century History" and the cooking journal "Slow."


Tuten earned a number of summer research grants from both Emory University and Wake Forest University and a fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Emory University. He also was a member of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society and the Omicron Delta Kappa Academic Honor Society at the College of Charleston.


Wade Roberts, a Huntingdon resident, came to Juniata in 2008 as an assistant professor of philosophy after earning a doctoral degree from Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 2007. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and English in 1996 from Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Ala. and earned a master's degree in philosophy in 1997 from Duquesne.

He has taught courses on medical ethics, environmental ethics and business ethics, as well as courses on current moral problems and the philosophy of religion. He has had articles published in journals such as "Social Philosophy Today" and "GR Journal for the Arts, Science and Technology."

John Wright, a resident of Huntingdon, came to Juniata in 2002 from the private sector, where he worked team project leader at SunGard Investor Accounting Systems in Wayne, Pa. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Juniata College in 1993. He went on to earn a master's degree in computer science from Villanova University in 2000.

Wright started his business career at SunGard in 1993 as an associate programmer analyst. He was promoted to programmer analyst in 1995 and became senior programmer analyst in 1998. In 1999, he was named team project leader. At SunGard he supervised a team of programmers in the design, testing and development of several software products used by the banking industry in corporate trust applications.

Since returning to Juniata, Wright has concentrating his teaching on such topics as programming, computer organization, operating systems and human-computer interactions.

He remains active in several professional organizations, including the Association for Computing machinery and the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges. His research centers on human-computer interaction.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.