PROVIDENCE — Robert B. Hackey, professor of health policy and management at Providence College, has been named Rhode Island Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

The South Kingstown resident, who joined PC faculty in 1999, was chosen from a list of 300 professors throughout the United States.

The U.S. Professors of the Year program is the only national program that recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring.

It’s the second award this year for Hackey. In April, he won the 2007-08 Joseph R. Accinno Faculty Teaching Award at PC.

Hackey earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Rhode Island and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University. In 2007, he was a visiting scholar at the prestigious A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University.

His approach to teaching appears on his PC profile: “Every semester, I tell my classes that the college pays me to make their lives uncomfortable so that they might develop, or in some cases discover, talents and skills within themselves.”