The College of Liberal and Professional Studies is pleased to congratulate Clayton Colmon, from the Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences program, and Nazli Bhatia, from the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program, for being named 2025 distinguished teaching award winners.
Clayton Colmon, PhD, has been honored with the 2025 Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs. Dr. Clayton Colmon is the director of curriculum design for the Arts and Sciences Online Learning team at Penn. In this role, he works with instructors to conceptualize, create, and support educational experiences. Clay believes lifelong learning is integral to any sustainable social system and appreciates the transformative potential of blended and online learning modalities. He is an advocate for inclusivity in present and future knowledge-building communities and uses inclusive design practices in his work. Clay also adapts his instructional design approach to meet individual pedagogical needs.
Before coming to Penn, Clay has taught courses on digital rhetoric, American literature, and science fiction at the University of Delaware. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and political science, with honors, from Rutgers University. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Delaware. Clay’s work lives at the intersection of critical race, gender, queer, and utopian studies, as he examines technology’s impact on queer communities of color, creative knowledge-work, and social change. He has presented and published scholarship on queer afrofuturism, digital pedagogy, dystopic urban spaces, and critical worldbuilding.
Nazli Bhatia, PhD, has been awarded the 2025 Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Professional Graduate Programs. Dr. Nazli Bhatia is an associate professor of practice in behavioral and decision sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a lecturer at the Wharton School, where she teaches award-winning courses on negotiation in the MBA and executive programs.
In her research, Nazli seeks to better understand the powerful role words can play in a variety of interpersonal contexts. The main domain in which she explores this question is negotiation, where she studies rhetorical strategies—that is, the different ways in which proposals, offers, and concessions can be presented to influence the negotiation process and outcome. Though past research has mostly treated the bargaining process as an exchange of numbers. Nazli’s work finds that the way in which offers are communicated critically influences interpersonal and economic outcomes in negotiation. In addition to rhetorical strategies, Nazli studies the intersection of gender and influence within both negotiation and non-negotiation contexts. Her research has been featured in media outlets such as Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
In the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program, Nazli teaches two courses: Negotiation Behavior and Organizational Behavior. She has a PhD in organizational behavior and theory from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to coming to Penn, she worked as an assistant professor in Portugal and in Qatar and taught courses on cross-cultural management, teams, and influence.
LPS applauds Clay and Nazli for their outstanding commitment to education.
Read more about the 2025 School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Awards >
