Annual prize honors two medical school employees as ultimate team players
The medical school’s annual SPIRIT award spotlights the staff behind the scientists
Dean Philip Pizzo congratulates Jeanne Heschele Thursday night for winning a SPIRIT award, which honors outstanding members of the medical school staff. She is operations coordinator for the research management group.
BY HUGH POWELL
Firefighting is not in Jeanne Heschele’s job description, but last year that didn’t stop her from dashing out of her office with a coffee pot to douse flames kindled by a discarded cigarette.
For this and other exemplary service, Heschele and another medical school employee, Woody Lorman, won the fourth annual SPIRIT awards last Thursday at Dean Philip Pizzo’s staff recognition dinner. Pizzo also thanked staff who were celebrating 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 years of helping keep Stanford’s research engine at full revs.
“This is a really dynamic school and people are often under a lot of pressure to perform,” said Cori Bossenberry, director of human resources for the School of Medicine and chair of the SPIRIT award committee. “Without people helping to keep things running we might not be able to produce the kind of research that results in a Nobel prize winner.”
The awards netted Heschele and Lorman each $1,000 and an “A” parking permit for the year. Their names will be added to the SPIRIT award plaque in the dean’s office.
Heschele is operations coordinator for the research management group and has been at Stanford for seven years. She runs the group’s Web site, keeps staff stocked with supplies and trouble-shoots some of their computer problems.
Heschele is most proud of her work in publicizing grant and fellowship opportunities to the School of Medicine’s more than 700 faculty members. When she was first assigned this project, the system consisted of a box of unsorted papers. Today, it is accessible on the Web and provides dozens of links to granting agencies and databases.
Lorman has been a financial analyst in the Department of Medicine for two and a half years. He described his job as “crunching numbers” to analyze the department’s productivity and expenditures.
In nominating Lorman for the award, his co-workers expanded on that modest assessment. They praised Lorman’s creativity, unbeatable optimism and initiative. A cheerful person who finds novel solutions, jots them down in binders and shares them in the office, Lorman is a one-of-a-kind colleague, they wrote.
“This is cool,” Lorman said. “It kind of validates what I’m trying to do—be a team player.”
Both winners are dynamic employees who go beyond the call of duty to make sure things work smoothly, according to their nominators. For Heschele, that included saving her building —a modular trailer—from going up in flames last year.
A smoker had tossed a smoldering cigarette butt into the wood-chip landscaping outside her office. “I smelled smoke,” she said, “and there was a two-inch flame coming out of the wood chips and burning up the wooden entry ramp.”
Heschele dashed out and drowned the flames before they could spread. It was the second such fire she has extinguished.
Lorman’s data-analyst persona dissipates behind his Harley-Davidson exhaust when he leaves the office. A Jimmy Buffett fan who reportedly rides with a stuffed parrot behind him, he spends much of his free time helping coach Special Olympics baseball and basketball teams.
Neither winner had definite plans for their prize money. Heschele said she would donate part of it to a friend’s son’s college fund. Lorman said his daughter, who is a senior in high school, might wind up going to school here, “so it might go back to Stanford,” he said.
This was the fourth year of the SPIRIT awards, which were created to honor staff members who excel in six categories: service orientation, positive attitude, initiative, resourcefulness and reliability, innovation and being a team player.
Both winners stressed they were just examples in a workforce full of good people. Bossenberry agreed. “I just wish we could give more awards,” she said, “because there are so many deserving people.”
