Archive for the ‘Awards’ Category

Vera Haugh receives Arnice Streit Award

June 19th, 2013

Vera Haugh

VERA HAUGH, an administrative services administrator in the Department of Philosophy and in Religious Studies, is this year’s recipient of the Arnice P. Streit award.

The award, which recognizes distinguished service to the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), was created in 1987 in honor of ARNICE P. STREIT, who established a record of excellence during her 27-year career in H&S.

Haugh is recognized for her creativity, her financial savvy and her ability to adapt to changing systems and departmental cultures.  As one nominator put it, Haugh “has an uncanny knack for converting information into simple organized molecules and connecting the dots with ease.”

Haugh received particular praise for helping to build Philosophy Talk, a syndicated radio program hosted by KEN TAYLOR, professor of philosophy, and JOHN PERRY, emeritus professor of philosophy.

 

“She began providing administrative support when the radio program began on a shoestring and helped transition it to a professionally staffed and nationally syndicated operation,” said DAGMAR LOGIE, an administrative manager in the English Department who received the Streit award in 1992.

Haugh came to Stanford in 1992 and first worked in the Pediatrics Department at the School of Medicine. In 1997 she moved to H&S, where she worked as a human resources officer before leaving the university in 2001. She returned to Stanford in 2003 to become a financial analyst for the philosophy and religious studies departments.

 

The Streit award was presented at a recent luncheon presided over by H&S Dean RICHARD SALLER and ADAM DANIEL, senior associate dean of H&S.

 

Saller and Daniel also recognized the recipients of the Dean’s Award of Merit. They were:  ELYSE PIERSON, an administrative associate in the Department of Biology; KATHY MONTGOMERY, manager of the Chemistry Administrative Services Group in the Chemistry Department; COLLEEN MCCALLION, an undergraduate program adviser in the Department of Science, Technology and Society, and LAURA HUBBARD, associate director of the Center for African Studies.

—  ELAINE RAY

Stanford GSB students honor professors for extraordinary teaching skill

June 12th, 2013

Three Stanford Graduate School of Business professors – one from Germany, one from Russia and one from Taiwan – were honored by students this week for extraordinary skill in the art of teaching.

Anne Beyer

ANNE BEYER, associate professor of accounting, was presented with the 2013 MBA Distinguished Teaching Award for leading the school’s introductory financial accounting class. A graduate of the University of Stuttgart and the Kellogg School of Management, she joined the Stanford faculty straight out of business school, in 2006, and immediately began teaching the intricacies of business transactions, accounting terminology, and rationales for various accounting methods.

In their nominations, MBA students praised Beyer for her “uncanny ability to answer questions and cover complex topics in simple terms the whole class could understand,” and for fostering a classroom atmosphere “where questions – or mere expressions of confusion – were welcomed.” As one put it, “She is not flashy and entertaining, rather she is earnest and direct. … I did not have the highest grade in her class, but I did have the highest level of learning.”

Ilya Strebulaev

ILYA STREBULAEV, associate professor of finance, was presented with the 2013 Sloan Teaching Excellence Award by graduates of the master’s program for mid-career managers and executives. A graduate of the New Economic School, Moscow, and the London Business School, Strebulaev came to Stanford in 2004. In his Sloan Program course, Finance 229, he covered the foundations of corporate finance – including the management of liquidity, capital structure, financial forecasting, dividend policy, financial distress, the cost of capital and capital budgeting – for students with a wide range of finance experience. As one of his student nominators wrote, “It’s amazing how Ilya was able to understand the diversity of the group. He was committed to making sure we learned about real-life issues.” Said another: “I fell in love with finance after taking this class.” Strebulaev also won the MBA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009.

Charles Lee

CHARLES LEE, the Joseph McDonald Professor of Accounting, was awarded the 2013 PhD Distinguished Faculty Service Award for his work with doctoral students. Born in Taiwan and raised in Canada, Lee earned his PhD at Cornell and taught 14 years at Michigan and Cornell before serving as managing director at Barclays Global Investors (now Blackrock). Since joining the Stanford faculty in 2009, he has developed a strong interest in the investment environment in China and regulatory oversight of Chinese security markets.

In their nominations, students praised Lee for his tireless support and hospitality, even after office hours. “Charles is always excited to discuss research topics with students, and his enthusiasm is infectious,” wrote one. “Students leave his office energized and excited to pursue high quality research.” Another put it simply: “Charles has had a transformative influence – not only on my research, but also on my life.” This is the third year in a row that Lee has been honored for his teaching at Stanford GSB. In 2011 and 2012, he won the Sloan Teaching Excellence Award.

—THERESA JOHNSTON, for the Graduate School of Business

Fourth in a row: Stanford’s lightweight 8 crew team snags national title again

June 7th, 2013

Last Sunday, Stanford lightweight rowing’s I Eight took its fourth national championship in a row, capturing the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships’ Grand Final in Gold River, Calif.

The Cardinal jumped out to a quick lead and took the championship with a fine wire-to-wire performance. After 500 meters the Cardinal lead was one second, and a sustained push increased the lead to two and a half seconds by the 1,000-meter mark and to three seconds with 500 meters to go.

Over those final 500 meters the Cardinal boat out-pushed its competition, crossing the line in 6:47.68, just under four seconds ahead of second-place Harvard.

Senior Morgan Duffy wins SAA’s Sterling Award

June 6th, 2013
Morgan Duffy

Morgan Duffy delivering the student address at 2012 Convocation (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Graduating senior MORGAN DUFFY has received the Stanford Alumni Association’s 2013 J.E. Wallace Sterling Award for outstanding service to Stanford.

HOWARD WOLF, president of the Stanford Alumni Association and vice president for alumni affairs, presented the award at the association’s board meeting last month.

Duffy, who will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in human biology, has been actively involved in campus life. She was a junior class president and co-founder of Power to Act, a student group dedicated to safe social spaces for students with invisible and visible disabilities. She played an integral role in Dance Marathon, was the 2012 Freshman Convocation speaker and is currently a Senior Gift co-chair.

One of her nominators described Duffy’s role as a teaching assistant in his American Health Care Policy course this way: “Morgan is a special person – one of the rare kinds of students that got my attention for her dedication and kindness. Students respected her in a way that went far beyond the class.” Others commented on her resilience, strength and commitment to Stanford.

The Sterling Award citation honors Duffy for the “gentle yet sage wisdom she offers to her classmates, her colleagues and her university, showing us all what it means to be a dedicated volunteer,” and “for being a young woman whose very presence proves every day that fulfilling dreams is what everyone is meant to do.”

The Alumni Association presents the Sterling Award annually to a graduating senior whose undergraduate activities have made an impact on campus and who demonstrates strong potential for continued service to the university and the alumni community.

The award is named for the late J. E. Wallace Sterling, who served as Stanford’s president from 1949 to 1968.

—CARA HANELIN, Stanford Alumni Association

Darling-Hammond recognized for vision, lifetime achievement

June 5th, 2013

Linda Darling-Hammond

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford, has won two major awards in the past two months and is celebrating the publication of her latest book.

Early in May, Darling-Hammond was named the winner of the 2013 Education Visionary Award from the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 16 leading education associations with more than 10 million members.

“Our organization is committed to improving public education and student learning and is honored to recognize an individual who has worked – and continues to work – so diligently to achieve this common goal,” said CHERYL S. WILLIAMS, the group’s executive director, in a news release.

In April, Darling-Hammond was recognized with the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from Division L of the American Educational Research Association. (That division focuses on education policy and politics.) According to the division’s website, the award honors “a career of research that is characterized by both its technical quality and impact in academe or the world of policy (or both).”

The latest addition to Darling-Hammond’s research career is her new book, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement,which was released April 1 by Teachers College Press.

“Darling-Hammond makes a compelling case for a research-based approach to teacher evaluation that supports collaborative models of teacher planning and learning,” according to a summary on the publisher’s website. “She outlines the most current research informing evaluation of teaching practice that incorporates evidence of what teachers do and what their students learn. In addition, she examines the harmful consequences of using any single student test as a basis for evaluating individual teachers. Finally, [she] offers a vision of teacher evaluation as part of a teaching and learning system that supports continuous improvement, both for individual teachers and for the profession as a whole.”

—JONATHAN RABINOVITZ, Stanford Graduate School of Education

Sanitation project wins kudos from sustainability leaders

June 4th, 2013
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Setting up portable dry toilet in Haiti (Photo: Courtesy Sebastien Tilmans

Around the world, 2.6 billion people lack access to safe sanitation. To address that gap, Stanford civil and environmental engineering doctoral students SEBASTIEN TILMANS and KORY RUSSEL co-founded re.source, an initiative to deploy portable, affordable dry household toilets in the developing world.

Recently, a panel of judges representing NASA, Silicon Valley companies and Bay Area universities, among other institutions, named re.source the Best Overall Solution in the Showcase of Solutions for Planetary Sustainability. The showcase, part of the Sustainable Silicon Valley Water, Energy and Smart Technology Summit at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., on May 23, highlighted “game-changing” ideas “that can scale to have a positive impact for sustainability at a planetary level.” The re.source project beat out nine other finalists.

The project, developed under the guidance of JENNA DAVIS, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, received seed funding from the institute’s Mel Lane Student Grants Program.

Working with the Water, Health and Development program at Woods, Tilmans and Russel recently completed a pilot phase in which they tested several toilet models with users before deploying toilets to more than 130 households in Haiti.

The pilot was conducted in collaboration with Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods, or SOIL, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to protecting soil resources, empowering communities and transforming wastes into resources in Haiti. SOIL continues to operate the sanitation service.

The toilets separate solid and liquid waste into sealable containers that are regularly removed by a service that recovers resources such as compost from the waste. Customers can subscribe to the toilet service instead of buying a toilet at a prohibitive up-front price, and they can take their toilets with them when they move. Mobile tracking technology monitors waste collectors’ performance, maximizes efficiency and minimizes service costs.

Tilmans and Russel said they hope that re.source will help solve the challenge of delivering hygienic household sanitation to residents of dense urban slums. Normally, residents in these areas choose among open defecation, crowded public toilets or expensive private pit latrines that can’t be emptied safely in the narrow alleys.

“The award is significant to us because it recognizes the importance of household-level sanitation across the world,” Tilmans said. “It will help mobilize further investment and efforts in our sector.”

Tilmans and Russel are seeking funding to scale up re.source.

—ROB JORDAN, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

David Donoho wins $1 million mathematics prize

June 3rd, 2013

DAVID DONOHO, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, has been named the 2013 Shaw Laureate in mathematics. Awarded by the Hong Kong-based Shaw Foundation, the Shaw Prize recognizes recent breakthroughs by active researchers in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, and life and medical sciences. Donoho is a professor of statistics.

The Shaw Prize was established in 2002 by Run Run Shaw, a film and television producer in Asia and noted philanthropist. The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences is one of the most prestigious in mathematics and includes a $1 million award.

Donoho, who joined the Stanford faculty in 1990, was recognized for his work to get a more detailed analysis out of large numerical data sets. Specifically, the award committee cited his “profound contributions to modern mathematical statistics and in particular the development of optimal algorithms for statistical estimation in the presence of noise and of efficient techniques for sparse representation and recovery in large data sets.”

—BJORN CAREY

 

Gabriel Garcia will receive medical school diversity award

May 31st, 2013

Gabriel Garcia

To an already impressive list of honors, GABRIEL GARCIA can now add one more: He is the 2013 recipient of the Dr. Augustus A. White III and Family Faculty Professionalism Award.

Garcia is a professor of gastroenterology and hepatology, and the associate dean of MD admissions for the School of Medicine. He will receive the award  during a June 3 reception.

The award is administered by the school’s Office of Diversity and Leadership, and honors a faculty member who has worked to help reduce health disparities or to enhance the effectiveness of minorities in the university community through research, education, mentoring or service. It is named for White, who was the medical school’s first African-American graduate and has been a pioneer and role model for underrepresented minorities in academic medicine.

In a letter nominating Garcia for the award, PHILIP PIZZO, former dean of the medical school, wrote that Garcia demonstrated deep commitment to admitting a highly diverse group of medical students each year. “More specifically, Dr. Garcia has championed recruiting students with broad and different backgrounds, from those deeply engaged in science and research to those committed to social justice, art and the humanities,” Pizzo wrote.

GARRY GOLD, professor of radiology, wrote that Garcia has long taken his interest in diversity beyond the borders of the campus. For instance, he noted that Garcia is the co-founder of the Patient Advocacy Program, a yearlong course that trains pre-medical and medical students in community and free clinics, including the Ravenswood Family Health Center in East Palo Alto.

“Community outreach is at the core of collaborative enterprise centered on the patient, and Dr. Garcia’s local accomplishments have certainly furthered the School of Medicine’s ability to impact minority populations,” Gold wrote in his nomination letter.

Garcia has also sponsored “alternative spring break” trips for undergraduates that examine health issues of farm workers in the Salinas Valley, and a similar spring break trip for medical students to study Native American health issues at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. And he helps lead the Community Health in Oaxaca Program, which is designed for students committed to working with the immigrant Latino population in the United States.

Garcia also works closely with an organization founded by medical students in 2007 to contribute to the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health, and to advocate for LGBT patients and providers. In addition, he served as faculty director of the university’s Haas Center for Public Service from 2006 to 2010.

In 2012, he received the Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize from the Haas Center. That same year, he was named the William and Dorothy Kaye University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, part of the Bass University Fellows in Undergraduate Education program.

This item was originally published on the School of Medicine’s news website.

 

Eight students receive James W. Lyons Award for Service

May 30th, 2013

Lyons Awards winners with former dean of students Jim Lyons (photo by Susan Burk)

Eight students have received the James W. Lyons Award for Service for their exceptional contributions to the Stanford community. The James W. Lyons Award for Service was established in 1981 and named in honor of former dean of students JIM LYONS. The award recognizes service contributions made by students from a variety of schools, departments, teams, clubs, residences and community projects.

The 2013 Lyons Award recipients are:

ELISE GEITHNER: Geithner initiated a profound cultural shift within the Greek community and residences related to wellness and body image. She developed the workshop “Am I Good Enough Yet?” in collaboration with Health Promotion Services, which helped engage her sorority. The program has permeated the rest of campus, helping students shift their perspective on body image and other challenging issues.

DIANA GONZALEZ: Gonzalez mentors local youth at the East Palo Alto Stanford Academy and East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring Program. She is a founding member and editor of the publication El Aguila, founding member of Latinos Unidos, member of Mariachi Cardenal, peer advisor at the Haas Center, Mass and ceremony chair for Nuestra Graduación and participant in the Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and Youth and Education Law Project.

CATHERINE JAN: Jan has helped make the transition to Stanford more welcoming by creating programs for New Graduate Student Orientation (NGSO). As head community associate, she helped the Graduate Life Office enhance the community associate program. Jan was also recognized for her programming contributions with the Graduate Student Council and Women in Electrical Engineering.

BRIAN KOOIMAN: Kooiman enhanced the musicality and reputation of the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band as band manager. Kooiman worked logistical magic to prepare and lead the 280-person organization through appearances at the Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl Game. He created strong partnerships with offices across campus. His commitment and leadership instilled a greater sense of shared stewardship within the organization.

BRAD MOYLAN: Moylan served as ASSU Elections Commissioner. He also enhanced the football experience by reinvigorating the Big Game Rally as a leader of the Axe Committee. Moylan also mentored student organization leaders as peer adviser for the Student Activities and Leadership office, served on such committees as the Stanford Historical Society Board and helped make the transition to Stanford a memorable experience for the class of 2015 as a freshman transition coordinator.

RICHARD SAPP: Sapp was recognized for his commitment to enhancing the lives of persons with disabilities. Through his innovative student-initiated course (HumBio 25SI) and leadership in Kids with Dreams, he has created youth programs aimed at developing lifelong athletic and social skills, while also providing Stanford students with meaningful mentorship experiences. He is a strong advocate for increased access and opportunities for students and community members with disabilities.

MONA THOMPSON: Thompson served as publicity coordinator for the Women’s Community Center, helped create the center’s femtastic blog and brought humor to discussions of feminism. She served as a peer health educator, social media guru with iThrive@Stanford and counselor, drama coordinator and unit leader for Camp Kesem. Thompson also served as an Urban Studies peer adviser and a project manager for the Sustainable Cities Service-Learning Course, and was an Impact Abroad participant.

NOEMI WALZEBUCK: Described as the “face of sustainability at Stanford,” Walzebuck co-founded the Green Consulting group, which provides sustainable resources and ideas to student organizations during their event planning. Additionally, she has worked with university partners to bring sustainability to the forefront for faculty, staff and students. She was responsible for bringing Al Gore to campus for the inaugural Stephen H. Schneider Memorial Lecture on climate science.

The students were honored at a ceremony and dinner featuring Jim Lyons. The event was hosted by Vice Provost for Student Affairs GREG BOARDMAN and Dean of Student Life CHRIS GRIFFITH.

Visit the website for a list of previous award recipients.

Nicole Gibbs goes out on top

May 29th, 2013

Nicole Gibbs Photo credit: Shirley Pefley/Stanford Athletics

When it was all said and done, junior NICOLE GIBBS saved her best for last.

On Monday, at the NCAA singles tennis championship, Gibbs defeated Nebraska’s MARY WEATHERHOLT 6-2, 6-4 to become the NCAA singles champion for the second year in a row.

The All-American from Santa Monica, Calif., Gibbs won all six of her NCAA singles contests in straight sets and closed out the year on a 14-match winning streak. In the process, she improved her career record to 30-1 during the month of May (including all NCAA team and individual play).

Gibbs’ individual accomplishment was that much more impressive, considering she was coming off the team title victory.

“I’m so happy to have won both the team and singles title,” said Gibbs. “But it was so sweet to win with the team. No memory can replace that.”

Earlier this spring, Gibbs publicly announced her decision to turn pro and forgo her senior year. She will leave behind a legacy of elite tennis.

Read the full story on the Athletics website.