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Award winners hailed at annual Faculty Recognition Dinner

Northwestern last week paid tribute to members of the faculty who have brought distinction to the University by earning important external recognition from societies and agencies around the world.

In all, 179 faculty were recognized for 222 awards garnered between October 2018 and December 2019. Honorees were selected by the multidisciplinary Faculty Honors Committee from faculty award recipients identified by deans and department chairs. Subgroups of the committee organized by academic area selected the most prestigious awards for recognition from their respective academic areas. 

Honorees were hosted by President Morton Schapiro and Provost Jonathan Holloway at the Faculty Recognition Dinner, held Jan. 29 at the Kellogg Global Hub.

President Schapiro kicked off the event by celebrating Northwestern as a national leader among research institutions and a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. This stature, he noted, is thanks to Northwestern’s exceptional faculty.  

Among the night’s honorees were elected fellows to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and recipients of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, American Academy of Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Materials Engineering from the Franklin Institute and a Grammy Award.

The University also recognized early-career faculty who were recipients of honors including the New Horizons Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation and the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientist and Engineers.

“It’s important to reflect upon the excellence around us at Northwestern on an everyday basis,” said Provost Holloway. As part of the program, he cited each of the evening’s award winners.

Two professors, Patty Loew of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and David Cella of the Feinberg School of Medicine, offered short presentations of their work to fellow honorees. 

Loew is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and educator who has given voice to the views and perspectives of Native populations as few mainstream journalists have done before. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Cella, the Ralph Seal Paffenbarger Professor and chair of the Department of Medical Social Sciences, is a pioneer in the field of patient-reported outcome measures. He has studied questions regarding the more humanistic side of evaluating the value of new medical treatments by focusing on quality of life measurement in clinical trials. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.