Faculty focus - Michael Shoaf

Michael Shoaf’s passion isn’t confined to teaching students or creating light and sound elements for productions in East Carolina University’s School of Theatre and Dance.

He shares it with the community, producing an annual holiday light show at his home on Harell Street in Greenville with more than 125,000 lights choreographed to seasonal songs.

He started the display while in high school in Durham, where he grew up. He brought what is now a larger show to Greenville after he began teaching at ECU, in the same program where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 2013. He received an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Shoaf began preparing the show this summer, virtually building it on his computer before putting up lights in October.

The show has been featured in several news broadcasts, newspapers and even ABC’s The Great Christmas Light Fight. Like a theater production, Shoaf said he enjoys the reaction from viewers, who sometimes leave notes in his mailbox.

“The kids go crazy. They always want ‘Let It Go.’ Most of the adults love ‘Dominick the Donkey,’” Shoaf said.

He also is often asked for advice on lighting and sound design in area schools, where he has taught classes or helped price equipment for administrators.

In high school, Shoaf wasn’t sure what he wanted to study in college.

He took a theater class, where he learned the offstage work required for productions.

“You realize there’s this background world of theater, and you can kind of control the audiences’ emotions with sounds, light,” he said. “Being able to teach students how to do that is a fun thing to dive into.”

It’s not uncommon for lighting designers at universities to do other things like sound or projection, which he enjoys. “I’m a very tech-heavy person and love the technology aspect of the job. Lighting tech, sound tech are important because if those go wrong, the show’s a bust,” he said.

Shoaf isn’t the only Pirate in his close-knit family. His sister Karen ’14 received her bachelor’s in exercise science and is an Army Chinook helicopter pilot. Sister Hannah started her medical residency at ECU Health this summer.

– Crystal Baity

Michael Harris has been named dean of the ECU College of Business. He had served as interim dean since July 2022. He started at ECU in 2004 as an assistant professor in the Department of Management. He chaired that department from 2014 until 2017, when he was named director of the Miller School of Entrepreneurship, North Carolina’s first named school of entrepreneurship. Harris has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from ECU and a doctorate from N.C. State University.

Marame Gueye, an associate professor in the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences Department of English, has won a competitive Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award for the 2024-2025 academic year. Since Oct. 1, she has been teaching and conducting research on a 10-month long project titled “Discourses of Wifing.” It focuses on how Senegalese women think about wifehood as a service they render to men. Gueye focuses on African and African diaspora literature. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal and a doctorate from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Rukiyah Van Dross-Anderson, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the Brody School of Medicine, won the second statewide NC Biotech Venture Challenge on June 27. She received $40,000 from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center in seed funding for her company, Claradele Pharmaceuticals, which is working on a patented therapeutic to treat melanoma. Van Dross-Anderson was one of five teams from across the state pitching their innovations. Claradele is in the preclinical phase of the commercialization process, which takes an invention and moves it through various checkpoints before it’s delivered to the market for public use.

Michael Waldrum, dean of the Brody School of Medicine and chief executive officer of ECU Health, has been named chair-elect of the board of the Association of American Medical Colleges. His term began Nov. 12, 2024, and lasts until the AAMC annual meeting in November 2025, after which he will serve a one year term as board chair. Waldrum served as chair of the AAMC’s Council of Teaching Hospitals and Health Systems (now called the Council of Academic Health System Executives) from 2022-2024.