“I remember being told by a Regents Professor that what you really remember from your academic career is the students. After all the published papers and all the scientific meetings, he was right. It’s the students I remember the most.”

When an astrophysics student needed a topic for his senior thesis, Terry Jones suggested a legal brief on mining rights to an asteroid. Not a good choice for a future astrophysicist. But Jones knew the student was bound for a legal career, and the thesis honed his writing and research skills. It also made a great topic during interviews for law school internships.

Nobody has worked harder for students, both individually and collectively, than Jones. In his 18 years as director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Astronomy, Jones recruited and oriented new students, advised astronomy majors, shepherded the department through the transition from quarters to semesters--and the list goes on.

He misses no chance to involve students in research and is an unsung hero to returning students. These are students who have dropped out and returned, often to find their physical sciences core requirement half done. Jones lends the special help they need in navigating the multistep process necessary to patch it together.

Jones is a master at “show, don’t tell.” In one class, he held up a ball that represented the sun and explained how Earth would be just a speck of dust somewhere down the hall and that Alpha Centauri (the nearest sunlike star) would be another ball sitting on the beach in California. “It was demonstrations like that that made the information vivid and exciting for me to learn,” recalls a student.

Jones received the IT Outstanding Instructor Award in 1993.

Visit the Terry J. Jones faculty Web page here.