People in the News

Banking

Tom Howard joined Metropolitan National Bank as a senior vice president and senior lender. He previously was a senior vice president with Guaranty Federal Savings Bank. He duties primarily in-volve transactions in commercial lending. In addition to Howard's recent position with Guaranty, he has banking experience at First Savings of Springfield, Union Planters Bank, Mercantile Bank and Boatmen's. He attended SMSU as an economics major and graduated from the Missouri School of Banking and the National Commercial Lending School.

Education

Lewis Beckham has joined Webster University as an adjunct professor on its Springfield campus. He is a quality as-surance consultant for Farmers Insurance Group and a member of the Ozarks Re-gional Campus advisory board. Beck-ham will be teaching corporate responsibility in the MBA degree program.

Southwest Baptist University in-stalled two academic chairs at the start of the spring 2002 semester. Dave Bennett, assistant professor of evangelism and church ministry, was installed as the Jack Stanton Chair of Evangelism. Formerly he was the evangelism director at the Missouri Baptist Convention. Bennett earned a master of divinity degree from Southwest Theological Seminary and is now completing his dissertation for a doctoral degree from the University of New Mexico. Barry Ellis, associate professor of business administration, was installed as the Ruby Letsch-Roderique Chair of Finance. Prior to joining the SBU faculty in 2001, he taught briefly at Texas Women's University. Before that he taught at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Ellis received a master of business administration degree from East Texas State University in 1980. He earned a doctorate in 2000 at the Uni-versity of North Texas.

Staffing

Jill Holland has been named accounting/fi-nance consultant for Express Professional Staffing, a division of Express Personnel Ser-vices. She has been with Express Personnel since 1999 and previously held the position of senior staffing supervisor for office services and sales executives.

Holland completed a bachelor of arts degree in journalism at the University of Oklahoma.