Thomas Amidon began his career as an educator “fairly late in life.”

Despite the late start, Amidon was recently named the 2015 College Technology Educator of the Year by the Technology Alliance of Central New York.

“Being in front of the classroom is fun for me,” Amidon said. “I’ve always enjoyed when you’re talking with students and you see the lights go on, you see they learned something. It’s a thing of beauty, frankly.”

Amidon started in the paper industry where he worked for 23 years and finished his career as a manager of The Corporate Research Center in Tuxedo, New York. In 2000, he returned to his alma mater, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, because “SUNY-ESF was the smartest place on Earth to do the work he meant to do,” as working in new forest-based materials was not the norm in the corporate world.

He was interested in working in the new forest-based materials industry because he said the sustainable society is going to need a lot more renewable, sustainable resources in the future than it’s gotten in the past.

There was an opening as a chair in the paper science department and over the next seven years, Amidon helped the department evolve to become paper and bioprocess engineering along with several other faculty members. They aimed to develop a curriculum in bioprocessing with the help of faculty who were willing to add courses and voluntarily accept higher workloads.

Amidon was invested in this development because it created a large increase in the range of what the university could educate students to be.

“Bioprocessing is a bigger part of the industry of the future,” said Amidon, who believes it is also a large part of where the pharmaceutical, chemical and food industry is going.

Once the bioprocessing curriculum was approved, Amidon joined a team that was pushing to create an advanced certificate program for graduate students. Amidon credits this curriculum creation and growth as a reason he won the College Educator of the Year Award.

The transition from manager to educator didn’t feel as different to Amidon as would be expected, and he said he’s always enjoyed the sharing of knowledge.

Amidon said he always felt at home in his role as an educator. Even while working in the paper industry, he was always the person that knew what wood was, “physically, chemically, anatomically, morphologically… and I would help other people understand the importance,” he said.

Maria Welych, the president of TACNY, said that awards like this are important for the educators as they are recognition of all the hard work that they have put in.

Welych said STEM education is important for the future of central New York as this region is trying to push itself to be a center of green technology. Welych added that students need to be educated and encouraged to go into STEM fields, and one way of doing that is by rewarding educators who make STEM fields interesting.

“We need to highlight people that are doing a fantastic job,” Welych said.

She said she believes that this recognition will also be largely beneficial for the university.

“There are some unique programs there and they’re doing some amazing research, and people don’t know that,” Welych said. “Having a College Educator of the Year from SUNY-ESF means that that work is being recognized.”

Published on April 12, 2015 at 10:49 pm

Contact Anjali: acalwis@syr.edu