Nice to meet you

Nice to meet you . . . These 5 bring new faces, new ideas to Avery Hall

By Charlyne Berens
Alumni News Editor

   Avery Hall’s “garden level” is home this fall to three new faculty members. Ed Johnson, Jeanne Marquis and Yin Yin Wong have joined the advertising de-partment. In addition, Denise Luedtke has joined the staff in the college’s main office, and Laurie Thomas Lee is in her second year as a full-time member of the broadcasting faculty.

   Ed Johnson
   Advertising

  Ed Johnson says he looks at teaching from an advertising standpoint, viewing the students as clients.

  “There are no nicer clients,” he says of college students. Besides, “someone else recruits the clients and makes sure the bills are paid.”

  Johnson brings experience in the advertising business and in teaching and a newly-awarded Ph.D. to UNL. He started his career as a photographer but says he soon decided he’d be better off “in the business of asking for photographs, not of taking them.” So he spent the next 10 years in advertising as an account executive with an agency, as manager of retail marketing for two different publishing houses and as advertising manager for a magazine.

  After teaching two years at Central Missouri State University, Johnson began a Ph.D. program at the University of Alabama, completing the degree this summer. His dissertation focused on the meaning of typography in trademarks.

  “The theories behind advertising interest me,” Johnson says. “A lot of people don’t know the reality behind those quarterly sales figures.”

  Johnson is teaching advertising re-search and visual communications this fall. He and his wife and three teenage sons moved to Lincoln during the summer and are enjoying their new state, Johnson says.

  “The world would be a better place if everyone had Nebraska’s good sense.”

   Laurie Thomas Lee
   Broadcasting

  Laurie Thomas Lee grew up in Kearney but didn’t plan to live here as an adult.

  “I never thought I would be coming back to Nebraska,” Lee says of her return to the state in January 1992.

  It was her husband’s desire to study at UNL for his Ph.D. in astrophysics that led the couple to Lincoln, Lee says. Their first child, Meredith, was born soon after they arrived, and Lee began teaching part-time in the broadcasting department in August 1992. She joined the faculty full-time in August 1994. The couple’s second child, Jonathan, was born in June 1995.

  Between Kearney and Lincoln, Lee earned advanced degrees in broadcasting: an M.A. from the University of Io-wa in 1983 and a Ph.D. from Michigan State. She finished her dissertation after moving to Lincoln and received the doctorate in 1993. She taught three years at East Central University in Oklahoma after earning the master’s degree.

  Lee worked in radio news during her days as an undergraduate broadcasting major at Kearney State College. While she was teaching in Oklahoma, she spent one summer studying Mexican mass media in Mexico City and another working at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles.

   During her years at Michigan State, Lee did consulting work for cable companies and phone companies.

   At UNL, Lee teaches undergraduate production courses similar to those she taught in Oklahoma and as a graduate assistant at Iowa and Michigan State. She says she enjoys the students at UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications and thinks they are somehow nicer and kinder than other students she’s worked with.

  Part of that may be attributable to the college structure itself, Lee says.

  “It’s a nice small-college atmosphere here, but with some big-school perks.”

   Denise Luedtke
   Dean’s Office

  Denise Luedtke thought she wanted to get away from Nebraska, but two years in the Phoenix area convinced her otherwise. The Milford native moved back to her home state and says she is glad she did.

  Luedtke worked part-time at the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Milford while she attended UNL full-time for a year. Then she reversed the order, working full-time and taking classes part-time. She spent two years in Phoenix but came back to Nebraska in 1993, partly because her mother was ill and partly because she wanted to get her young daughter away from the city and back to Nebraska.

  She worked for several real estate firms in Omaha in 1993 and ’94 but wanted to return to the Lincoln area to continue her schooling at UNL. When her mother’s health became worse, she moved to Milford to be with her, then looked for a job at the university.

  Luedtke was a secretary in the phyics department from June 1994 until she moved to the main journalism office in August, replacing Pat Lehecka, who retired. Luedtke says she is excited about learning her new job and appreciates everyone’s kindness to her.

   Luedtke and her husband, Marty, were married in February and live in Lincoln. She says she is pleased to be back in Nebraska and back at UNL where she can continue her education — 12 credit hours this semester — while she works.

   Jeanne Marquis
   Advertising

  Jeanne Marquis came to advertising the way many college students come to a career choice.

  As a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marquis was looking for a major, she says.

  “I had so many interests — art, psychology, marketing.”

  Advertising seemed a logical choice:

“Advertising encompasses all my interests and then some. It’s kept me challenged and excited.”

  After two years working for an advertising agency and an employment agency in Milwaukee, Marquis earned an M.S. in advertising from North-western University in 1981. She joined retailer Carson Pirie Scott’s Milwaukee headquarters in 1984 as a copywriter and had several other jobs before being named fashion copy director in 1994.

  Marquis moved to Lincoln in 1984 when her husband Bruce became director of UNL’s Lied Center for Perform-ing Arts. She taught promotional writing during the spring semester of 1995 and became a full-time faculty member this fall, teaching both promotional writing and media strategy.

  She had never been to Nebraska be-fore and has been pleasantly surprised by the state, she says.

  “I’ve found people are concerned about education and about maintaining their quality of life.”

  Marquis and her husband have an 18-month-old daughter and are expecting their second child in January.

   Yin Yin Wong
   Advertising

  To Yin Yin Wong, computers are more than just a tool for processing words and numbers.

  “Computers make us ask questions about ourselves,” she says, “how we collaborate with others, how we like to write, how we communicate. It’s fascinating.”

  Wong is a half-time member of the college faculty this year under a dual-career fellowship, a program made possible when her husband accepted a teaching job at UNL. She will help to further develop JET, the college’s Web site, and will lecture in classes about technology and graphic design.

  Wong earned her undergraduate degree in graphic design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She worked for a design firm in Pittsburgh for one year before accepting an offer from Apple Computers in Cupertino, Calif.

  There, she was part of a research team exploring how people are likely to interact with information and computers in the future and how advanced computers of the future should be able to support that interaction.

  After four years with Apple, Wong returned to school, earning an M.S. in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Visible Language Workshop. She finished the degree in August and moved almost immediately to Lincoln.

  Born in Burma, Wong has lived in the United States since she was 8. She had never been to Nebraska before she arrived here in August with her husband, Mark Donohue, a new faculty member in the UNL College of Architecture this fall.

  She is impressed with how safe and secure Lincoln is and how happy people seem, and she is looking forward to understanding more about journalism as she works in the college.