President’s Awards for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers

The President’s Awards for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers at Georgetown University are designed to recognize and celebrate the integration of outstanding research and excellence in teaching. The awards not only honor the individual recipients but also reflect the standards of excellence at Georgetown.

The awards:

Each year, the President names outstanding full-time faculty members to be recognized as Distinguished Scholar-Teachers. Award recipients receive an annual grant of $10,000 for three academic years to support their scholarship. The 2024 recipients will be recognized at Spring Faculty Convocation.

The selection process:

The nominations received by the President’s Office are reviewed by a faculty committee made up of prior awardees from all three campuses. The committee provides an unranked short list of nominees to the President for selection.

The committee bears in mind that distinguished scholarship can take on vastly different forms depending on the scholar’s field, and that scholarship is demonstrated and documented in myriad ways. Likewise, evidence of faculty members’ teaching excellence can be found in multiple sources, including (but not limited to) course evaluations, project mentoring, dissertation direction, laboratory and clinical supervisions, and in the accomplishments of students after leaving Georgetown.

The nominations:

ANNOUNCEMENT: The next call for nominations cycle will run during the Fall 2024 semester.

All members of Georgetown’s community are invited to nominate exceptional faculty members who have spent a substantial amount of their careers at Georgetown and who remain dedicated both to ambitious ground-breaking research and to student engagement and excellence in teaching, both of which are hallmarks of our student-centered research university. Self-nominations are not possible for this award. Faculty in administrative roles above the level of unit head are ineligible for this award while serving in those administrative roles. A faculty member can only win the award once.

Nominators may, if they wish, solicit additional nomination letters from others to support their nominations, and/or may include quotes from those letters. It is very important to note that nominators must be vigilant about issues of power that can arise where they request letters from more junior colleagues and students. The utmost care should be taken to ensure that any solicited nomination letters are freely given by those who do not feel coerced in any direct or indirect way.

Nominators are encouraged to highlight evidence of scholarship and teaching excellence as well as to demonstrate the connections between these two elements. The committee recognizes that nominations from students may focus primarily on teaching and mentoring, but encourages faculty nominations to provide evidence of how scholarship and teaching have been integrated across the careers of the nominees. It is also helpful for nominations to provide contextual information, for example, in relation to research, nominations should include information on the relative prestige in the field of the publication venues, awards, grants, and prizes, as well as explaining what citation counts mean in relation to the specific research area. In relation to teaching, it is helpful for nominations to explain how many classes have been required vs. electives, which classes are considered large or small in the context of the department or unit and so on.

What to include in nominations:

A CV for each nominee should be submitted along with the nomination.  Teaching evaluation scores are provided to the committee for the finalists by the EVP offices of each campus and so do not need to be included.

Eligibility and renomination:

Each year, the committee receives far more worthy nominations than can be put forward to the President. Highly deserving candidates cannot all win. Nominators, and nominees, should not be discouraged by a failure to win in any given year, however. All candidates who reach the stage of final discussion by the committee prior to the selection of finalists forwarded to President DeGioia will automatically be kept in the pool for two more years (their nominators will be contacted and invited to update their letters and provide updated CVs for their nominees).  Renominations are welcome.

2024 Honorees:

Reena Aggarwal, Ph.D.
Robert E. McDonough Professor of Finance and Director,
Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy,
McDonough School of Business

Sarah Stewart Johnson, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Biology, College of Arts & Sciences,
and Science, Technology and International Affairs Program, School of Foreign Service

Kathleen Anne Maguire-Zeiss, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine

Adam Rothman, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Sciences, 
and Director, Georgetown Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies

List of past awardees:

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Jennifer Natalya Fink, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of English
Core Faculty in the Program in Disability Studies
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Marc M. Howard (L’11), J.D., Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Government
Director, Prisons and Justice Initiative
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Josiah Osgood, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Classics
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Julie E. Cohen, J.D. view video
Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology
Georgetown University Law Center

Deborah A. Phillips, Ph.D. view video
Professor
Department of Psychology
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Stefano Vicini, Ph.D. view video
Professor
Department of Pharmacology & Physiology
Georgetown University Medical Center

Rachel Barr, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Psychology
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Paul Butler, J.D.
The Albert Brick Professor in Law
Georgetown University Law Center

Alison Games, Ph.D.
Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History
Department of History
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Kenneth J. Kellar, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Pharmacology & Physiology
Georgetown University Medical Center

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Alison Mackey, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Linguistics
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

John R. McNeill, Ph.D.
University Professor
Department of History, Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences
and Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

Italo Mocchetti, Ph.D.
Professor and Vice Chair
Department of Neuroscience
Georgetown University Medical Center

Cristina Sanz, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

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Lisa Heinzerling, J.D.
Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center

Chandan Vaidya, Ph.D.
Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

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James K. Freericks, Ph.D.
Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Chair in Physics
Department of Physics
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

G. William Rebeck, Ph.D.
Professor of Neuroscience
Department of Neuroscience
Georgetown University Medical Center

Alexander Sens, Ph.D.
Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of Hellenic Studies
Department of Classics
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

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Darlene V. Howard, Ph.D.
Davis Family Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychology
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Donald C. Langevoort, J.D.
Thomas Aquinas Reynolds Professor of Law 
Georgetown University Law Center

Anton Wellstein, M.D.
Professor of Oncology and Pharmacology 
Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center
Georgetown University Medical Center

Derek Goldman, Ph.D. view video
Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
Department of Performing Arts
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Christian Wolf, Ph.D. view video
Professor
Department of Chemistry
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

James Collins, Ph.D. view video
Professor
Department of History
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Karen Gale, Ph.D. (awarded posthumouslyview video
Professor of Pharmacology
Department of Pharmacology & Physiology
Georgetown University Medical Center

Philip Schrag, J.D. view video
Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law
and the Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies
Georgetown University Law Center

Der-Chen Chang, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences

Richard Schlegel, M.D. Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Pathology
Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center
Georgetown University Medical Center