Winners of Dedman College's 2009 'Spirit of Innovation Award' Announced

DALLAS (SMU) — Dean Cordelia Candelaria of SMU's Dedman College announces the first annual winners of the Dean’s "Spirit of Innovation Awards." Recipients include faculty, students and staff who are fostering innovation through projects designed to promote discovery and learning at Southern Methodist University.

The 2009 Spirit of Innovation Award recipients will be honored at 3 p.m. May 1 in Dallas Hall's McCord Auditorium during the last faculty meeting of the academic year.

The awards were introduced by the Dean Candelaria to encourage innovative collaborations throughout the college and to recruit outstanding graduate students for advanced studies. The applications were screened by an advisory committee, and the following projects were selected to receive the inaugural Dedman College Dean’s "Spirit of Innovation Awards":

• Darryl Dickson-Carr , Associate Professor in the Department of English, will use the award to recruit talented graduate students at the Summer Institute of Literary and Cultural Studies (SILCS) with the aim of diversifying and strengthening the pipeline to the future professoriate. 
  
• Peter Moore , Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, will pursue a three-pronged approach for identifying and recruiting a diverse pool of qualified graduate students in the areas of Mathematics and Statistical Sciences.
  
• Rajani Sudan , Associate Professor in the Department of English, will bring visiting scholars to Dedman College as part of the Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference "to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas among junior as well as more senior scholars."
  
• Rachel Romero and Mara Morhouse of the Dedman College Office of Undergraduate Student Relations are the recipients of the Staff SOARS award for 2009. Their project is to establish an organization of Dedman College Ambassadors to promote greater community and Dedman identity within the school.
  
• George Enriquez, undergraduate student majoring in Finance and Spanish, designed a project to engage an interdisciplinary team of students in presenting a simulated interaction between Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. He was selected for the Student Exemplars of Excellent Development (SEED) Award.

Emphasizing the importance of academic excellence, Dean Candelaria notes that “these awards recognize that Dedman College has pushed the pursuit of knowledge and creative inquiry from the earliest founding days of the University in the 1900s.” 

For more information about the awards and the reception, call the Dean’s Office of Dedman College at 214-768-3212.