Uzoma Miller named as OHIO winner of 2025 MAC Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success

Dr. Uzoma Miller has been named as Ohio University’s winner of the 2025 Mid-American Conference (MAC) Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success.

The award is presented by the MAC each year in order to honor the outstanding efforts of faculty to support and develop students both inside and outside of the classroom. 

Miller, who has taught at OHIO since 2022, serves as an assistant professor of instruction and undergraduate advising coordinator for the Department of African American Studies and affiliate faculty member with the Center for International Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Miller also is an Inclusive Excellence Fellow, Arts and Sciences Experiential Learning Fellow, and an Arts and Sciences Advancement, Alumni Relations, and Partnerships Fellow.

“His passion for developing thought-leaders who are committed to exploring issues in innovative ways that combine scholarship, creativity, and self-inquiry, anchor all his activities,” the MAC Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success website states about Miller. “As such, he places value in applying historical thinking to help transform communities and society at large through academic depth, rigor, and imagination.”

Miller said that it is a great honor to receive this award.

“Winning this award first represents the best of what both of my parents, Dr. Calvin Miller and D. Antoinette Handy-Miller, a political scientist and arts-educator and administrator respectively, exposed me to as a youth. Although they both transitioned 21 and 16 years ago, I am forever indebted to their examples, and know they are both smiling,” Miller said.

He went on to say that winning the award also demonstrates to his daughter, Jalani Miller, a graduating senior from the University of Texas-Austin, to never compromise one's standard and that life truly is a marathon and not a sprint.

“Next, this award is a testament to 24 years of work in the trenches trying my best to actualize what it means to have a growth mindset and build on each experience across my journey to this point. From my first semester teaching college history at Jackson State University in 2000 to my current role at OHIO, and the myriad university and K-12 opportunities in between, a story has unfolded,” Miller said. “This story is one that focusses on my ‘why,’ and the perpetual resolve to unapologetically find ways to motivate my students to show up as the best versions of themselves.”

The award is different from many other academic or research-based awards, as it celebrates the commitment of the MAC to a holistic student experience and the creation of an environment that supports success in school and in life. 

Miller explained that he focuses on student success in his teaching by balancing rigor with empathy.

“Specifically, I strive to model a standard of excellence, professionalism, and self-inquiry, whereby they hopefully realize that I care about them as human beings first and foremost. That said, I also model that having standards does not mean I cannot show compassion simultaneously. I was once exposed to the basic phrase that ‘to be clear is to be kind.’ Accordingly, I am vested in the belief that if I have no standard for my students, and if I accept the bare minimum from them, then I truly do not care about them, which in turn would be meaningless, going through the motions just to get a check, and ultimately an extreme version of dismissiveness,” Miller said.

Miller enjoys teaching at Ohio University and said he is grateful for the opportunity to work with his students.

“What I enjoy most about working with students at OHIO is their collective intellectual curiosity,” Miller said. “The department I serve and the content I teach are unique and oftentimes jarring to the student's initial sensibilities, who primarily have received their K-12 education here in the state. Yet-and-still, I enjoy the overwhelming investment they show towards being open to evidenced-based theories and interrogation of how such ideas have contemporary relevance too.“

For more information on the MAC Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success, see the MAC website.