Nicholas Acosta Selected as Fulbright Instructor of English and American Culture in Russia

Nicholas "Nick" Acosta earned double Master of Arts degrees in Language and Cultures-Applied Linguistics and in Economics in May 2018 while teaching Russian as a graduate part-time instruction. Acosta heard about the Fulbright U.S. Student Program first through an email and later from former colleagues who were also Fulbright students thus piquing his interest in applying for a teaching assistantship. After submitting his letter of intent, he waited patiently until he could apply for an English teaching assistantship in Moscow knowing the competition would be fierce but was overjoyed when he was selected as a 2019-2020 Fulbright student. He will teach English as a second language including a unit on American culture to Russian university students with an opportunity to bring their American cultural lens more into focus as they learn more about American movies, literatures, poetry, music and art. He was featured in Texas Tech Today, April 22, 2019. Click here to read the entire article.

Mhd Hasan Almekdash Named Director of Statistical Services and Lead Biostatistician

Mhd Hasan Almekdash was began his new position in May 2019 as Director of Statistical Services and Lead Biostatistician at the Clinical Research Institute at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. The campuses will be working with Lubbock, Dallas, Abilene, Odessa, Midland and Amarillo. Some of his duties include overseeing all statistical services provided by the Clinical Research Institute (CRI), including but not limited to direct interaction with faculty, staff, and trainees; supervise, evaluate and train biostatisticians/analysts within the CRI. He will develop and maintain policies on statistical procedures for the management and analysis of clinical research data.

Nick Henry, Ph.D.

Nick Henry began his undergraduate studies in 2003 as a German major at Texas Tech. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he joined the MA program in Applied Linguistics. After earning the MA in Applied Linguistics in 2008, he completed an MA in German in 2009. During his time in the MA program, he took courses in both Applied Linguistics and in German literature and culture, and he taught undergraduate courses in German. These experiences laid a strong foundation in teaching and research, and led him to pursue work in both fields. During the 2009-2010 academic year, he stayed at Texas Tech and applied to Ph.D. programs while working as a part-time instructor in German and researcher in Applied Linguistics.

In 2010, Nick moved to Pennsylvania, where he began his Ph.D. in German Applied Linguistics and Language Science at Penn State University. During this time, he took courses on Applied Linguistics, taught undergraduate German courses, and further developed the research program that he began at Texas Tech. His dissertation research focused on describing how learners process sentences and understanding the effectiveness of psycholinguistically motivated instructional techniques, specifically Processing Instruction.

After graduating from Penn State in 2015, Nick was happy to return to Texas with his wife Lindsey, who is also a Texas native. He joined the Baylor faculty as a Lecturer in German, where he taught in the German and Linguistics programs. After three years at Baylor, Nick joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Second Language Studies in the Department of Germanic Studies in August 2018. He currently teaches German and Linguistics courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and heads the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab. He has continued to conduct research on the interaction between second language pedagogy and sentence processing, most recently having conducted studies on the acquisition of the accusative case in German, the effects of prosody in the development of a second language grammar, the acquisition of grammatical gender, and the effectiveness of Processing Instruction.

 

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