2009 International Award Winners:
James Greenberg and John Townshend

Every year, the Office of International programs honors outstanding University of Maryland faculty with international awards for their service or innovation. Below are profiles on the 2009 winners, Dr. James Greenberg and Dr. John Townshend.

Distinguished International Service Award

Dr. James D. Greenberg

Dr. James D. Greenberg is Director of the new Office of International Initiatives and of the College of Education K-16 Partnership Development Center.   He was founding director of the University of Maryland Center for Teaching Excellence, as well as the founding Honors Director in the College of Education.  Recently, he also served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in South Africa, Senior Fellow at the National Center for Urban Partnerships (NCUP) in New York, as Visiting Fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and as invited keynote speaker and workshop leader at the University of Concepcion in Chile and the University of Lima in Peru. 
For many years Dr. Greenberg has been an invited speaker and workshop leader in Ecuador, where the first Diplomado in University Teaching in Ecuador – designed and taught by Dr. Greenberg, Dr. Roberta Lavine, and colleagues – was recently completed. He has accomplished many other projects in Ecuador and in countries all over the world.  He is the recipient of numerous awards, both on campus and off, and has been the keynote speaker at many conferences. During the past ten years alone, he has received four university awards for outstanding teaching and leadership.  He has served as a consultant to schools and school systems, colleges and universities, federally and corporate sponsored projects, and both U.S. agencies and local universities in several foreign countries.

In 1964, he earned his A. B. in Classics at Brown University, completed an M. A. in Education at the University of Connecticut in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Education, Curriculum and Supervision at the University of Connecticut in 1969. He is past President of the Maryland Association of
Colleges for Teacher Education and has served as co-Chair of the Professional Experience Design Team of the State of Maryland Task Force on Teacher Education Redesign.  His list of memberships, and leadership positions within them, is outstanding; and his thirty-five years of service to the university has added greatly to its success.

Landmark Award

Dr. John Townshend

Dr. John Townshend was appointed the Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, effective July 27, 2009, and has already succeeded in using his unique brand of leadership to effect changes.  He has started work to fulfill his stated goals for the College of building more cross-disciplinary cooperation and research, responding to major research opportunities, increasing state/university support, emphasizing an entrepreneurial focus on fund raising across the college, forming strategic partnerships to benefit research and academic programs, enhancing excellence in teaching and service, increasing faculty diversity, and fostering inclusiveness and intra-college cooperation.
Arriving at the University in 1989 as Chair of the Department of Geography, Dr. Townshend used his talents to enable the department to become a recognized leader in the use of satellite technology to study changes in the terrestrial environment and determine how those changes reflect and impact social, political, economic, environmental, and other conditions of human life.  During his time as chair (1989-1995 and 2001-2009), the department has achieved higher levels of excellence on many fronts.
Dr. Townshend earned his BSc (1967) and Ph.D (1971) from University College London.  Before coming here, he held positions at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Reading (England), Clark University (Massachusetts), and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania).  His current research focuses on the rates and causes of vegetation cover change, especially deforestation, through the use of remotely sensed data from satellites.  He is also the Principal Investigator of the University’s Global Land Cover Facility, which houses the largest open access non-governmental online collection of Landsat satellite data in the world.

He was recently named an Honorary Fellow of the UK Remote Sensing and Phtogrammetry Society. He has also won the Royal Geographical Society’s Back Award, the Outstanding Achievements Award from the Association of American Geographers, and the William T. Pecora Award for Outstanding Leadership in Advancing Global Remote Sensing. We are happy to add the Landmark Award to this list.