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December 9, 2024
Jennifer Lackey and Marcelo Vinces have received the 2024 Daniel I. Linzer Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity.
Given annually by Northwestern’s Office of the Provost, the award celebrates individuals or groups who work collectively to build a more diverse, inclusive and equitable climate on campus and enhance diversity across the spectrum, including race, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, age and political affiliation.
Lackey and Vinces will be honored at a reception later this winter. The recognition comes with a $5,000 award.
Jennifer Lackey is a professor of philosophy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is being honored for her “indefatigable commitment to and innovative leadership” of the Northwestern Prison Education program (NPEP), which made history in 2023 when incarcerated students inside Stateville Correctional Center were the first in U.S. history to be conferred a bachelor’s degree from a top ten university.
Lackey has worked tirelessly with colleagues and administrators at Northwestern as well as officials within the correctional system to create a program that offers as many as 10 classes per quarter at Stateville and Logan Correctional Center for Women. The program has helped NPEP students to transform their lives.
Marcelo Vinces is an assistant professor of instruction in Molecular Biosciences and a college adviser in Weinberg. He is being recognized for his dedicated and expansive work to promote equity and inclusion for students across the college.
Vinces not only supports his own advisees and has increased the capacity of the entire advising office to foster inclusion, but he also works with various offices and organizations across campus, including promoting underrepresented students in STEM.
He has devoted himself to fostering inclusion for all students, most notably including first-generation, lower-income, DACA, LGBTQ, and Latinx students, through his mentorship, participation in public discussion forums, committee work and service as faculty advisor to GoSTEM (Graduate Out in STEM) and co-advisor to Northwestern’s chapter of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.
