Dr. Camille Tessitore King, associate professor of psychology at Stetson University, has been named winner of Stetson’s 2011 McEniry Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award, the most prestigious given to a DeLand faculty member, was presented at Spring Commencement.

McEniry Award winners are selected by faculty and students and must be both outstanding scholars and teachers. Former Stetson President J. Ollie Edmunds established the McEniry Award in 1974 to honor William Hugh McEniry, dean of the university from the mid-1940s to 1960s.

Students and colleagues nominating King for the award used adjectives including “passionate,” “energetic,” “challenging,” “intelligent” and “inspirational” to describe King. She is considered a well-respected colleague, accessible mentor and excellent teacher. In their nominations, two students said: “My interactions with her have strengthened my belief in my own abilities” and “I would never have achieved what I have at Stetson without the help and support of this professor.”

A member of the faculty in Stetson’s College of Arts & Sciences since 1999, King regularly teaches Introduction to Psychology; Great Experiments in Psychology; Drugs, Mind, and Behavior; and Biological Psychology, and she has team-taught in the University Honors Program. She is director and principal lecturer of the Betty Batson Bell Brain & Learning Lecture Series, which explores how the brain learns and remembers. She often gives lectures on the workings of the brain to community groups and to local schoolchildren from pre-school through high school.

Over the past 14 years, King has collaborated with Dr. Alan Spector, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Florida State University, on research investigating the functional organization of the gustatory system, funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. She has also been the co-recipient of a research grant from the National Science Foundation. She won Stetson’s Hand Research Award in 2004 and has co-authored a number of research papers published in prestigious academic journals.

She had a series of major assignments over a three-year period as part of the university’s recent comprehensive revision of its course offerings and degree requirements, and she has chaired the University Athletic Committee for the last four years. Just last year, in recognition of her excellent work as the faculty adviser of the Stetson Chapter of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology, she was one of two advisers in the southeastern United States to receive a Faculty Adviser Research Grant.

King earned a doctorate in psychology with a specialization in biological psychology from the University of Virginia and did post-doctoral research at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan. She is married to Dr. Michael S. King, professor of biology at Stetson; they have a daughter, Natalie, and a son, Anthony, both of whom are in college.