Professor Bertolas Elected to National Executive Committee
Dr. Randy Bertolas, chair of the Department of History, Politics, and Geography and professor of geography at Wayne State College, was recently elected to the National Executive Committee of Gamma Theta Upsilon.
Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU) is the international honor society in geography, established in 1928 and today serving 300 chapters throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Bertolas chartered the Lambda Zeta chapter of GTU at Wayne State College in 2002.
Bertolas grew up on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. He attended the University of Minnesota-Duluth and was studying geography in his dorm room the night the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975. Subsequently, he earned graduate degrees in geography from the University of Vermont in 1982 and from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1995. A high school instructor and wrestling coach in the 1980s, Bertolas has been teaching geography at Wayne State College since 1995.
He has received numerous awards including the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award presented by the WSC Student Senate in 2005, and the Distinguished Teaching Achievement Award presented by the National Council for Geographic Education in 2006. Bertolas also serves as coordinator of the Geographic Educators of Nebraska, a grassroots K-12 organization that collaborates with the National Geographic Society and is dedicated to raising the level of geographic literacy in the state.
Bertolas was elected alongside new GTU National Executive Committee members from Old Dominion University, Oklahoma State University and the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. |
