Every spring, the Heller School presents awards to members of the community for outstanding service in teaching, mentoring, teaching assistance, staff service and research team excellence. The awards are nominated from within the school community and determined each year by a committee of past awardees, students and recent alumni.
Dean David Weil presented the awards in Zinner Forum, starting with the longest-running recognition: the Heller award for teaching. This year’s recipient was alumna Jessica Santos, PhD’15, who is currently a lecturer and a senior research associate in the Institute on Assets and Social Policy. She teaches the course “Assets and Social Policy” and co-teaches “Immigrant Integration in the United States: Policy, Practice and People” with Susan Eaton.
The mentoring award, which can be presented to either a faculty member or researcher, was awarded this year to Tatjana Meschede, a senior scientist and senior lecturer in the Institute for Assets and Social Policy. This is the second time Meschede has received the mentoring award for her work and dedication to guiding PhD students through the dissertation process.
The staff service award was presented (with thunderous applause) to Mary Poor. Poor, who joined the Heller School just last year, is the academic advisor and practicum coordinator for the Sustainable International Development (SID) master’s program.
Dual degree student Liz Keeffe, MBA/MA SID’18, received the teaching assistance award for her excellence as a TA for the financial accounting course, a required class for the MBA program and one of the more challenging quantitative courses in that degree program.
Lastly, Dean Weil presented the newest Heller award, which recognizes research team excellence and was added in 2016. This year’s honoree for research team excellence was the diversitydatakids.org team from the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy, led by ICYFP Director Dolores Acevedo-Garcia. She shares the award with ICYFP team members Pam Joshi, Erin Hardy, Nick Huntington, Clemens Noelke, Lindsay Rosenfeld, Maura Baldiga, Frank Li, Nancy McCardle and Leslie Zales.