Monfort College of Business Faculty Honored for Educational Excellence

Monfort College of Business Associate Professor Moe Manshad has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Sears Helgoth Distinguished Teaching Award

Moe Manshad, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer Information Systems (CIS) in the University of Northern Colorado (UNC)’s Monfort College of Business (MCB), has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Sears Helgoth Distinguished Teaching Award.

Administered by UNC’s College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, the award is presented each year to a faculty member (tenured, tenure-track, contract renewable) who has demonstrated outstanding, innovative teaching benefiting the lives and educational journeys of UNC students.

Manshad has been teaching at UNC since 2018 and has received several other accolades for his educational endeavors, including being named MCB Teacher of the Year in 2020 and UNC’s CIS Professor of the Year in 2019, 2021 and 2023. Notably, Manshad is the first MCB faculty member to receive the Sears Helgoth Award since its inception in 2014.

“My courses are built around productive friction; students work problems out loud before they touch a keyboard, and they have to explain why an answer is right, not just produce one,” Manshad said. “That is uncomfortable in the moment, and it is where the learning actually happens. Having the university recognize that approach tells my students the difficulty was the point.”

Before joining UNC, Manshad spent more than 13 years in industry working in software engineering, user experience design, systems management and software development. At Hewlett-Packard, he developed large-scale web-service and workflow-based systems for the healthcare industry. He then worked at White Sands Missile Range in support of the Department of Defense as a software engineer, systems engineer and software group lead. His work in accessibility goes back even further; starting in 2002, he developed software at the Math Adaptive Technology Lab for Students with Disabilities in Las Cruces. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from New Mexico State University while working full time.

Outside of his teaching, Manshad has spent more than 18 years researching human-computer interaction, along with IoT and embedded systems. Much of that work has been with the blind and low vision community at a national level, developing assistive technology through tangible user interfaces: novel, multimodal methods that let blind and low vision users build accessible graphical representations, such as mathematical graphs, expressions and equations, by physically arranging blocks on a tabletop.

More recently, his research has expanded into consumer behavior and financial technology, including work published in the Journal of Business Research on using vibration feedback in mobile payments to help reduce overspending. His research has earned him a number of grants from both the university and third-party organizations. Most recently, he was the recipient of the 2021 MCB Immersive Learning Grant and a Procter & Gamble Higher Education Program Grant in 2022.

Additionally, he currently serves as the first-ever faculty advisor for UNC’s recently-established Innovation Den — an interdisciplinary, contemporary makerspace located in Michener Library where students, faculty and staff can experiment, create and play.

In this role, he helps guide the development of hands-on, interdisciplinary learning experiences and trains faculty, staff and students to integrate innovative tools and emerging technologies into their work.

Manshad also brings real-world innovation into the classroom. Through a NASA Technology Transfer University partnership built into his BACS 385 course, students develop commercialization pitches for NASA technologies. Additionally, one of his student teams placed third in a NASA pitch competition in spring 2026. He also co-founded the MCB Multiexperience Lab.

For his recognition as the 2026 Sears Helgoth Distinguished Teaching Award winner, Manshad will receive a plaque and a monetary award.

About the Sears Helgoth Distinguished Teaching Award

UNC faculty members are honored for their excellence in teaching, thanks to the generosity of donors Kathleen Sears ’76 and Jim Helgoth. The couple established the Sears Helgoth Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014, and since then, it has been administered by the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences and given annually to a faculty member who has demonstrated a record of excellence in instruction at UNC. Applications were reviewed and the awardee selected by a committee of assistant/associate deans, one from each academic college and previous award recipients.

Sears, who earned her degree in Elementary Education at UNC, says that as a student, she benefited from outstanding teachers who taught future educators how to teach well.

“At UNC, the professors were modeling what a good teacher looks and sounds like. It is an amazing level of educational and pedagogical technique,” she said.

It’s that high quality of teaching that Sears and Helgoth hope to reward and encourage faculty and to provide access and the opportunity for students to learn from outstanding educators.