During the May 27 spring convocation, the Graduate School announced the recipients of the dean’s awards, formally recognizing graduate students and faculty who have made a positive impact on the training environment and culture at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Individuals were nominated by their peers, colleagues and trainees, and six awards were given out in the following categories: Doctoral Mentoring Award; Masters Mentoring Award; Distinguished Service Award; Outstanding Dissertation Award; and the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Award.
Each award category specifically honors a facet of the CU Anschutz graduate training environment that contributes to the overall competitiveness of its programs.
“Effective mentoring has some component of innate talent, but, for the most part, it is like other professional skills that need to be honed through work and intentional practice,” said David Engelke, PhD, dean of the Graduate School, explaining the importance of the mentor awards.
The DEI awards are crucial to the graduate school and the university’s mission to increase diversity, equity and inclusion as a whole, Engelke said.
“Graduate students have long been key players in the recruitment of students from underrepresented backgrounds into our graduate programs and have contributed significantly to community outreach and education. It is the direct result of these efforts that has resulted in the increase in diversity of our graduate student body,” he said.
“The Graduate School, like the university at large, sees that embracing colleagues with different life experiences and ways of seeing problems is the right thing for this institution to do from a moral and ethical standpoint, and there is also substantial evidence that it enriches resulting research and scholarship outcomes.”
Here are the winners and their stories (in order of their photos at top):
- Jason Aoto, PhD, Dean’s Doctoral Mentoring Award
- Rachel Culp-Hill, MS, Distinguished Service Award
- Tiffany Callahan, PhD, Outstanding Dissertation Award
- Shelby Smith, MS, Distinguished Service Award
- Meagan Chriswell, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award
- F. Amos Bailey, MD, Masters Mentoring Award
Stories written by: Kristine Sikora, assistant dean and director of recruitment and marketing for the Graduate School
