Skip redundant pieces
Oread

May employees of the month

Teresa Pepper Unclassified employee

Teresa Pepper

Current title: Programmer III and technical analyst, Information Services.

What that means: Pepper writes programs for the student financials team and analyzes and solves system problems. She supports and works closely with the staff who process student refunds in the Lawrence campus Bursar's Office and in the Student Accounting Office at the KU Medical Center.

Notable: The Bursar's Office on the Lawrence campus processes approximately 28,000 refunds worth more than $40 million each year. Many of them go to students who are on financial aid and need their refunds for living expenses. Pepper's redesign project reduced the number of processing steps from 27 to five and in turn reduced overall processing time by more than 95 percent. The processing system is now nearly fully automated.

Amy Pabst University support staff

Amy Pabst

Current title: Administrative associate, aerospace engineering.

What that means: Pabst serves as departmental receptionist, undergraduate and graduate secretary, and assistant to the chair and faculty.

Notable: Richard Colgren, associate professor of aerospace engineering and departmental scheduling officer, said changes in the university class schedule and in the process for administering and allocating classrooms have increased the workload in the past two years. Pabst took on the "complex jigsaw puzzle" of scheduling and has made the new system function effectively without the use of scheduling software.

Pabst recognized that both the undergraduate and the graduate handbook were severely out of date. On her own initiative, she revised them and updated the associated elements of the department Web site.

KU IQ

To submit your cell phone number to receive emergency text messages from the upcoming emergency contact system, go to the KU home page and click on the “emergency contact” link. Log in to the secure site using your university ID to provide a cell phone number and provider as well as primary emergency contacts, updated phone numbers and addresses. As of June 4, a total of 6,850 students, staff and faculty had signed up and submitted their cell phone numbers.