Dr. Lori Sefton
At the IAA, each academic year, we select one of our faculty as our Distinguished Lecturer. This award recognizes an outstanding faculty member with a record of extraordinary performance in teaching, service, and creative activity. I am very pleased to recognize Dr. Lori Sefton as the IAA’s 2025-2026 Distinguished Lecturer.
Dr. Sefton, who joined the IAA faculty in 2021, holds the rank of Senior Lecturer. She teaches INAG 110 (the IAA’s oral communication course), as well as INAG 132 (Agricultural Leadership and Teamwork). She dedicates an extraordinary amount of her time to serving the program in other ways, as well. For those of you who don’t know this, the IAA offers 40 sections per semester of Oral Communication—we have eight faculty members who teach that course full-time. There’s a lot of administrative overhead to doing that—scheduling, classrooms, leading meetings. Starting next fall, Lori will serve as the INAG 110 Course Coordinator: the person who makes things go. She serves on—are you ready for this list?—the IAA’s Marketing, Outreach, Recruitment, and Engagement Committee; the Awards Committee; and the Pedagogy Committee. She chairs the IAA’s Professional-Track Faculty Promotions Committee. She serves as the IAA’s representative to the University of Maryland Senate. And she’s part of the committee that is developing a new open-access textbook for the oral communication course (our INAG 110 instructors have been right on the cutting edge of the move to open-access textbooks for this fundamental studies course, and they’ve been recognized across campus for adopting that initiative to improve student access and outcomes). She also serves on the Professional Track Faculty Symposium Logistics Committee, which organizes a symposium every year to promote and celebrate PTK faculty all over campus.
What’s more, Lori is always happy to lend a hand with anything that needs to be done, whether it’s staffing our table at Maryland Day, organizing the Impromptu in the Garden public speaking contest, or applying her excellent organizational skills to bring order to our supply closet after our move from Jull Hall to Symons Hall.
Nominations for Distinguished Lecturer can come from the faculty member themselves or from a colleague. Lori was nominated by a colleague, who said of her, “Her mentorship has been invaluable, as she personally guided me through the preparation of my senior lecturer promotion packet, a process I would not have undertaken without her encouragement and expertise.” Lori’s commitment to helping her colleagues advance is just one of the reasons that she is such an asset to the IAA; her colleagues, as well as her students, can rely on her to be there for them in any capacity they need.
