Two Employees and One Student Receive Award for Professional Achievement

VANCOUVER, Wash. — The Vancouver Business Journal has named three members of the Washington State University Vancouver community as recipients of the newspaper’s annual Accomplished and Under 40 award.

The award recognizes people in southwest Washington who are under age 40 and have distinguished themselves through outstanding achievements in the early years of their careers.

The recipients affiliated with WSU Vancouver are Jennifer Crooks, assistant director of campus advancement; Randy Mueller, a student government leader; and Tahira Probst, associate professor of psychology. A recognition luncheon will be held at the Hilton Vancouver Conference Center from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Nov. 10 to honor the award winners. Their profiles will be published in an upcoming issue of the Vancouver Business Journal.

Crooks, 31, began working at WSU Vancouver as a student intern in 1995. She was quickly promoted to positions with increased responsibility, becoming assistant director of campus advancement in 2003. For the past 19 months, she has also served as the department’s interim director. As an active and dedicated fundraiser, she has been responsible for a significant increase in major gifts (a 40 percent increase in private support to the university since 2003) to WSU Vancouver as well as the creation of five new endowed scholarships totaling more than $125,000 in scholarship. Additionally, there has been an ongoing increase in annual giving to the university through telemarketing, direct mail and an annual faculty staff campaign, which under her guidance grew from a donation level of 33 percent in 1999 to over 78 percent in 2005.

Crooks’ commitment to WSU Vancouver and the southwest Washington community is also apparent in her service roles, which include the George C. Marshall Leadership Award committee, the Willamette Valley Development Officers, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, the WSU Vancouver Diversity Council, the WSU Vancouver Student Emergency Fund committee and various other university committees.

A senior social sciences major, Mueller, 34, is director of legislative affairs for the Associated Students of WSU Vancouver. As a co-director of the “Committee to Save C-TRAN,” Mueller led a grassroots campaign to restore public bus service to WSU Vancouver and other areas of Clark County. The campaign was successful, with the C-Tran ballot measure receiving 68 percent of the votes last September.

In addition to his involvement with student government, Mueller is a volunteer for Mothers Against Drunk Driving and is an active member of the Washington Conservation Voters and the Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Mueller has owned Mueller Consulting Services for the past 11 years. At the peak of operations, he supervised 12 employees and had annual gross sales of more than $500,000 a year, providing entertainment and audiovisual services to the public. Over the last five years, he has scaled back the scope of his business and limited it to part-time work in order to focus on achieving his goals in higher education and public service.

Probst, 34, arrived at WSU Vancouver in 1998, having earned a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Within five years she was promoted from assistant to associate professor. She has published 27 articles and eight technical reports during her career at WSU Vancouver and is the winner of the 2002 Society for Human Resource Management Research Award. Recently, Probst was invited to be a visiting scholar to work with colleagues at the United Nations International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. The opportunity led to the submission of a $1.8 million grant application to the National Institute on Drug Abuse/National Institutes of Health to continue the research initiated at the ILO. As a result of her research presentations to the IESE Business School at the University of Navarra (Barcelona, Spain) and the Institute of Psychology at Zurich University, she now has ongoing projects and collaborations with colleagues at both universities.

As WSU Vancouver’s first diversity fellow, Probst developed a recruitment plan for increasing student diversity, including the MOSAIC fair, which hosts high school seniors and community college students in an on-campus orientation twice a year. Later this year she will host a visiting professor from Nigeria through the MacArthur Scholars Program.

Reservations for the Accomplished and Under 40 recognition luncheon can be made online at https://www.vbjusa.com/accomplished40.php or by calling (360) 695-2442.