ETSU bestowed its highest honor upon three professors with the presentation of the 2007 Distinguished Faculty Awards for Teaching, Research and Service.
The winners were nominated and selected by their faculty peers, and each received a medallion, a plaque and a $5,000 check provided by the ETSU Foundation during the annual Faculty Convocation.
Dr. Robert Schoborg, associate professor of microbiology at the James H. Quillen College of Medicine, received the Distinguished Faculty Award in Teaching. Schoborg is director of the medical microbiology course for medical students and teaches in the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program (BSGP).
Schoborg joined the Quillen faculty in 1994 and has been honored by his students with numerous teaching awards, including the Caduceus Club’s “Professor of the Year” award and the BSGP’s “Course Director of the Year” and “Professor of the Year” honors on multiple occasions.
In 2004, Schoborg received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to develop a cellular model that would explain how two common sexually transmitted diseases – Chlamydia trachomatis and Herpes Simplex Virus type 2 (HSV-2) – may affect each other.
Schoborg received a B.S. degree in microbiology and pre-veterinary sciences from Oklahoma State University and earned his Ph.D. degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine.
Prior to joining the ETSU faculty, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Jeff Ardell, associate chair/professor of Pharmacology at the Quillen College of Medicine, claimed the Distinguished Faculty Award in Research.
Ardell joined the ETSU faculty in 1998 and is currently the investigator or co-investigator for six extramural grants funded by the NIH, the American Heart Association and the Canada Institutes of Health Research.
These projects amount to approximately $1.73 million awarded directly to ETSU, and an additional $600,000 to fund collaborative research with the University of Montreal and the Oklahoma Health Science Center.
He has gained international fame for his pioneering research in the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS).
In addition to his own research, Ardell has been active in mentoring new scientists. Since 1999, he has obtained continuous support from the American Heart Association for ETSU’s summer research fellowship program that places Quillen medical students in active research laboratories. Many of these participants have gone on to win awards at the Appalachian Student Research Forum and have published their work in scientific literature.
Ardell holds a B.A. in biology from Colorado College in Colorado Springs and a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Washington. Prior to joining the Quillen College faculty, he was a professor at the University of South Alabama.
Dr. Peggy Cantrell, a professor in the Department of Psychology within ETSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and a practicing clinical psychologist, received the Distinguished Faculty Award in Service. Since joining ETSU in 1982, she has consistently provided high levels of service to the university, the surrounding community, and her profession.
Since returning to the classroom in 1998, Cantrell has been working to develop ETSU’s doctoral program in clinical psychology, which will welcome its first students in the fall of 2008. Her nomination stated that while Cantrell does not claim the idea for the program and has not labored alone, she has worked to make it a reality by conducting community-based needs assessment and planning, researching literature on psychology training, developing the curriculum, negotiating training placements and shared courses with regional partners and other departments, and much more.
“The result,” her nominator wrote, “is a cutting-edge, model program for the training of clinical psychologists to serve primarily as rural clinicians and researchers in health care settings. Dr. Cantrell’s work toward making this program happen reflects over a decade of tremendous but virtually unrecognized service.”
Cantrell has been active in the profession of psychology as an oral examiner for licensing, as a journal reviewer, and as an officer in the regional Intermountain Psychological Association.
She is on the clinical faculty of the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center’s American Psychological Association-approved psychology internship, which she was instrumental in developing. She has been active in task forces on developing continuing education guidelines for psychologists and upgrading licensing law in the state of Tennessee, as well as a local task force on domestic violence.
In addition, she is in demand throughout the region as a public speaker and is frequently invited to schools, churches, and civic organizations to address a wide variety of topics, from parenting issues, women’s concerns, violence, team-building, and group communication to mental health in Appalachia.
Cantrell holds a B.S. in psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.A. in psychology and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi.
Before coming to ETSU, she completed a research fellowship in sleep disorders and taught at USM, and she held various positions, including director of Virginia Outpatient Services, at Holston Mental Health Center.

Author