Alumni Award Winners announced at Homecoming

Alumni Awards

Arthur Beyer Award - Don Cowan

His father played the tuba in a dance band. His mother taught piano and organ for years, playing for silent movies and for Peggy Lee at Fargo Theatre. His siblings played the flute, drums,  and the trumpet. This harmonious union left him little choice as to his future. So, as a sophomore in high school, he learned to play the clarinet before graduating from Moorhead High School in Minnesota.

After joining the Air Force in 1950, he learned to play the saxophone and graduated from the Air Force Bandsman's School as advanced instrumentalist on the clarinet and saxophone. After the service, he decided to attend what was then Midwestern University. During registration he went to the band table to sign up. He was told he'd need to do a lot of marching since they only had a marching band at the time. He told them he'd already been marching for the past four years, and walked over to the choir table instead. And that walk set his future in music.

Cowan earned his Bachelor of Music Education degree in 1958 and his Master of Music Education in 1968.

He served as the choir director at S. H. Rider High School in Wichita Falls beginning in 1961. That arrangement must have pleased everyone because he stayed for 32 years. During that time, his choirs performed at 12 major cathedrals in Western Europe, two in Canada, two in Mexico, and many in the United States, including a Christmas performance at the Wichita Falls State Hospital each year for 32 years.

He often used his voice in ways other than singing, serving as master of ceremonies at more than 450 pep rallies and lending his help as public address announcer at Memorial Stadium for 20 years of football games. He also wrote the school song that still stands as a tradition at the school today.

When asked if it was difficult to fill a choir during his tenure, he answered, "We had 44 boys and 44 girls in the choir each year. About 300 kids would try out each year but many didn't make it. One year we had six spots open in the girls' alto section. Sixty-eight tried out. My daughter was one of them, but she didn't make it that year."

One of his former students, Janel Ponder Smith, was asked what she remembers about choir. " I graduated from high school 40 years ago, after having been in his choirs for 4 years, and I still feel the effects of my one-hour-a-day interaction with the man!!!  He had high expectations for each of his students, but he did it in an inexplicable way - it wasn't threatening nor did he try to be our best friend.  He just has a natural gift."

He now teaches choir part time at Burkburnett High School. "It's taken four years but we'll start this fall with 18 boys and 25 girls in the choir.

Teaching since 1961, he must have seen some real changes in students and music. "Not really," he quickly replied. "They're still the same kids. Some are funny, others serious. You have crazy students and dedicated students. The main change has been how divided their time is with so many activities. The music has changed, mostly louder. But we still sing Bach, and I think they like the challenge.

Dillard College of Business Administration

Michael J. Reiswig graduated from Midwestern State University in 1977 with a Bachelor in Business Administration degree with majors in Accounting and Business Administration and a minor in Economics. He began his business career as a staff accountant and later controller for Wichita Falls-based Lanchart Industries, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary at the time of L.D. Brinkman Corporation. Reiswig left private accounting and, with his wife Marty, started their first business, Reiswig and Company in 1985 performing audit services for property and casualty insurance companies.  By 1998 Reiswig and Company had grown nationwide with more than 300 employees. That year, Wausau Insurance Company and its parent company Nationwide Insurance purchased Reiswig and Company, naming Reiswig as vice president of audit services for Wausau Insurance Companies. After a later acquisition by Liberty Mutual in 1999 Reiswig continued his role as vice president until his retirement in 2001. Reiswig continued his involvement of consulting to the insurance industry, as well as expanding his focus on personal and real-estate investments. He is licensed by the Texas Real Estate Commission as a broker, and in 2001 he began DFWProperties.net, a Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex real-estate brokerage firm that sponsors more than 38 active real-estate agents and brokers and manages in excess of $55 million annually in real-estate sales. Reiswig and his wife have a daughter, Katy. They reside in Arlington, Texas. 

College of Science and Mathematics

Dr. Paulius Micikevicius graduated from Midwestern State University in 1998 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida in 2002. His dissertation was on parallelizing graph algorithms, and his research interests include parallel/high-performance computing, computer graphics, and graph theory. Micikevicius is a developer technology engineer for NVIDIA, which is a publically traded company on the Nasdaq at NVDA. NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor that generates breath-taking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. Their products are transforming visually rich and computationally intensive applications such as video games, film production, broadcasting, industrial design, financial modeling, space exploration, and medical imaging. Micikevicius previously worked at Aximetric, Inc. as a parallel computing consultant where he headed the cluster computing team. He was also an assistant professor of computer science at Armstrong Atlantic University in Georgia from 2003-07, where he was an active member of the Media Convergence Laboratory. This involved the designing of the 3D engine for the Mixed Reality experiences. He was also involved with protein structure prediction from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data and general parallel computing on GPUs. Micikevicius resides in Santa Clara, Calif. 

Prothro-Yeager College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Dr. Jen'nan Ghazal Read earned her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1995 from Midwestern State University, where she served as the student body president. She went on to earn her master's and doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She was also a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University from 2001-03. Read joined the sociology department as an assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine in 2003. Her research interests include gender, ethnicity, religion, and health, and her work particularly focuses on the assimilation experiences of Arab Americans and U.S. Muslims. Some of her earliest research investigated the meaning of the veil among U.S. Muslim women to assess the role of culture in the adaptation process of immigrants. Read is also interested in racial and ethnic differences in health and completed a project that examined the effects of immigration and racism on the health status of black Americans. Read recently joined the faculty at Duke University as an associate professor of sociology and the director of Postdoctoral Research at The Duke Global Health Institute. The DGHI works to reduce health disparities in our local community and worldwide. Recognizing that many global health problems stem from economic, social, environmental, political, and health-care inequalities, DGHI brings together interdisciplinary teams to solve complex health problems and to train the next generation of global health scholars. Read was honored as a 2006-08 Carnegie Scholar and is listed in Who's Who Among Arab Americans. She and her husband, Paul, live in Durham, N.C., with their two daughters, Lauren and Jaden.

Lamar D. Fain College of Fine Arts

Michael Gresham graduated from Midwestern State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication in 1995. He is the editor and publisher of the Kaufman Herald in Kaufman, Texas. Included in this broad title are the responsibilities of writing and editing news and feature stories, pagination, headline and photo caption writing, and much more.  He received the 2004 North and East Texas Press Association Photographer of the Year, 2003 North and East Texas Press Association Journalist of the Year runner-up and numerous Texas Press Association and East Texas Press Association awards for design, photography, sports writing, and news writing. He has previously held positions of editor and publisher of the Rockwall County News, editor of the Terrell Tribune and Kaufman County Life magazine, and sports editor of the Terrell Tribune. Gresham is married to Gina Clare Sciantarelli and is the father to four children: Anna, 5, Daniel, 4, Caden, 20 month, and Brooke, 8 months, as well as a grumpy 9-year-old miniature Schnauzer named Gus. Gresham also considers himself a struggling rookie T-ball coach to a gaggle of a dozen 4- and 5-year-olds.

College of Health Sciences and Human Services

Amy K. Cone graduated in 2007 with her Master in Public Administration. In 1998, Cone earned her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., where she received a Haven Research Fellowship from 1996-98. She is the assistant director of health for the City of Wichita Falls Health District, where she assists with the preparation and management of the annual budget, manages Medicaid administrative claims, and develops professional relationships and collaborates with other city departments. Cone also manages grants by participating on grant renewal committees, writing grants and preparing required reports, monitoring budgets and reviewing grant submissions. She is responsible for staff supervision, training, and recruitment. She has received extensive training in biological and chemical terrorism. Prior to the Health Department, Cone was the Public Health Emergency Response Coordinator. She was responsible for mitigation, planning, and response activities for bioterrism, infectious disease outbreaks, and other public health threats and emergencies.  Cone has been published in the American Aging Association Journal and received the President's Volunteer Service Award in 2005. She is a member of the MSU Health Sciences and Human Services Administration Programs Community Liaison Committee. Cone resides in Wichita Falls. 

West College of Education

Dr. Pam Midgett, LPC, graduated from Midwestern State University in 1993 with her Master of Education in Counseling. Prior to MSU she had earned a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Radio, TV, and Film from Baylor University. Midgett earned her Ph.D. in Counseling from the University of North Texas. She is the director of the Counseling Center at MSU, where she has served since 2006. Midgett administers and coordinates all programs and services offered through the counseling center, acts as the liaison between university, community, state, and national committees and organizations, and has developed and served on the Behavior Intervention Crisis Team. Midgett is also an adjunct professor for the West College of Education, where she teaches human development for those preparing for a career in counseling, student development, or human resources. Before joining MSU, Midgett worked in the private sector. She was the director of psychiatric services for Red River Psychiatric Hospital, where she managed all aspects of inpatient psychiatric adult, senior adult, and child and adolescent units of the 104-bed facility. She also has served as the director of clinical services at Rose Street Child and Adolescent Day Treatment Program, which is an acute day treatment program that provides highly individualized care to adolescents with a wide range of emotional problems and psychiatric diagnoses. Midgett is on the board of directors at Christ Home Place Ministries and the North Texas Area United Way, Greenbelt Counseling Association where she serves as president from 2007-08, and has many other affiliations. She has made numerous presentations throughout Texas from "Humor in the Classroom" to "Suicide Prevention in Adolescents." Midgett resides in Wichita Falls.