Dr. Jason V. Pugh
Dr. Jason V. Pugh, vice president of the Jackson County Campus, has been named one of the Coast’s top business leaders. The leadership award naming the Top 10 Community Leaders and Top 10 Business Leaders Under 40 is given annually by the Sun Herald and the Journal of South Mississippi Business to 20 winners who have achieved educational and personal success and volunteered with a variety of non-profit organizations.
“I am humbled to have received this award and it has been a great experience for me,” Dr. Pugh said. “However, I am not naïve enough to think that the award should not be shared. Any successes that I have had are a result of the hard work, dedication, support and compassion of the folks around me. I am surrounded daily by a supportive family, a supportive community and the best group of colleagues, administrators, faculty, staff and students anywhere in the community college system. If anyone thinks we’ve done well in this past decade, wait until you see what happens in the next one!”
Dr. Pugh, who taught physics and engineering mechanics at Gulf Coast from 1994-2000, played an integral role in the college’s participation in NASA’s Mississippi Space Grant that provides scholarships and research opportunities for two-year college students, and working with Stennis Space Center’s Education and Remote Sensing groups, helped develop a multi-media computer learning curriculum integrating remote sensing into the science concepts taught at the college. The multi-media project entitled “Heavenly Twins: A Multimedia Merging of the Arts and Sciences,” which Pugh helped develop, highlighted the similarities between the arts and sciences. It was a joint project of Stennis Space Center, Gulf Coast, and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.
From 2000 to 2005, Pugh was the Director of Distance Education for the Mississippi Virtual Community College, and from 2005 to 2008, he served as Associate Executive Director of Workforce, Career and Technical Education at the Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges. In 2008, he was chosen as the vice president of the Jackson County Campus. During his time in that position, he has been able to facilitate campus enrollment growth by over 10 percent per semester, making it the largest enrollment campus for the college and breaking campus enrollment numbers. He has also worked tirelessly on bringing to fruition the development of the Estuarine Education Center, a 40-acre center on the Jackson County Campus devoted to educating individuals about the value, importance and beauty of America’s largest undammed estuary system, the Pascagoula River Basin. He has also garnered community support for the college through active participation in the Jackson County Community. This has resulted in the recent donation of a 7-acre island by a Gautier citizen, and partnerships with industry including contributions to student scholarships and equipment from both Chevron and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding.
Pugh and other 2009 award recipients were formally inducted into the Roland Weeks Leadership Hall of Fame during a ceremony on March 19 at the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi.
