President’s Awards for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers
The President’s Awards for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers at Georgetown University recognize and celebrate the integration of outstanding research and excellence in teaching at our University. The Awards not only honor the individual recipients but also emphasize standards of excellence at Georgetown.
The Awards
Each year, the President names outstanding full-time faculty members to receive the awards and be recognized as Presidential Fellows. Award recipients receive an annual grant of $10,000 for three academic years to support their scholarship. The recipients of the President’s Awards are announced at the following Fall Faculty Convocation.
Nominations
All members of the community are invited to nominate exceptional faculty members who are dedicated both to ambitious research that is highly regarded and to the sort of student engagement and excellence in teaching that is the hallmark of our student-centered research university.
This year’s call for nominations is closed. During the Spring 2020 semester, a call for nominations will be shared with the University community.
The nominations received by the President’s Office are reviewed by a faculty review committee made up of prior awardees and review committee members. All three campuses are represented on the faculty review committee. They conduct an initial review of the nominations by campus and may request additional information to supplement a nominee’s dossier, if needed, to aid their deliberations. After meeting as a full committee to deliberate, the review committee provides an unranked short list of nominees to the President for selection.
In our selection, we will keep in mind that distinguished scholarship can take on vastly different forms depending on the scholar’s field, and that it is animated and documented in many ways. Likewise, we will look for evidence of faculty members’ teaching excellence not only in course evaluations, but also in other sources, such as student mentoring, including dissertation, project, laboratory and clinical supervision, and in the accomplishments of their students after leaving Georgetown. We encourage you to highlight such evidence in your nominating statement. We recognize that nominations from students may focus on the teaching element, while faculty colleague nominations may focus more on scholarly achievements. Letters from Chairs and/or colleagues can help enhance student nominations. The strongest candidates will show exceptional accomplishments at the intersection of these two elements of our mission.
Renominations are welcome. Each year, the committee receives far more worthy nominations than it has awards: highly deserving candidates cannot all win. Nominators, and nominees, should not be discouraged by a failure to win in any given year, and the committee particularly wants to encourage continued nomination of exceptional candidates. Beginning with nominations received in 2018, candidates who reach the stage of the final discussion of the committee, prior to the selection of finalists forwarded to President DeGioia, will be kept in the pool for three years. Finalists not chosen by President DeGioia will naturally belong to this group.
Along with the nominating form, the EVPs’ offices will provide additional materials reflecting the nominated faculty members’ accomplishments in teaching and scholarship to the faculty review committee.
2019 Honorees
Alison Mackey, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Linguistics
Georgetown College
John R. McNeill, Ph.D.
University Professor
Department of History, Georgetown College
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 College
Previous Honorees
2018
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, Psychology Department
Georgetown College
2017
- 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 - G. William Rebeck, Ph.D.
Professor of Neuroscience
Department of Neuroscience - Alexander Sens, Ph.D.
Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of Hellenic Studies
Department of Classics
2016
- Darlene V. Howard, Ph.D.
Davis Family Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychology - 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
2015
- 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 College - Christian Wolf, Ph.D. VIEW VIDEO
Professor
Department of Chemistry
Georgetown College
2014
- James Collins, Ph.D. VIEW VIDEO
Professor
Department of History
Georgetown College - Karen Gale, Ph.D. (Posthumous) VIEW 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
2013
- Der-Chen Chang, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Georgetown College - Richard Schlegel, M.D. Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Pathology
Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center
Georgetown University Medical Center