May 2007

Awards Honor Cream of the Colonial Crop

Part and parcel of the University’s Commencement is the recognition of outstanding members of the GW community. The awards to be bestowed at this year’s Commencement honor students, staff, and faculty who exemplify the best of GW.

Manatt–Trachtenberg Prize

Kristopher S. Ansin
Graduating senior Kristopher S. Ansin will receive this year’s Manatt–Trachtenberg Prize, which honors undergraduate students. While at GW, Ansin established Student Movement for Real Change, a student organization with a mission of raising money for the Kenyan Water Project and building schools in Kenya. Ansin also volunteered at a camp that fit prosthetic limbs on victims of land mines in Cambodia, with Habitat for Humanity in Zambia, and with the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. He will receive his bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology at Commencement.

Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prizes

Established and endowed by President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in honor of his parents, the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prizes are awarded annually to faculty members who have made a difference in their professions and the GW community.

Prize for Scholarship

Akos Vertes, professor of chemistry
As the co-director of the W.M. Keck Institute for Proteomics Technology and Applications, Vertes is the principal investigator charged with developing a new in vivo “protein microscope” to enable researchers for the first time to view how proteins interact in living tissue. The project is supported by a $1.5-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. Vertes also has co-edited and co-authored a book on laser ionization mass analysis and has more than 90 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals. He has been a GW faculty member since 1991.

Prize for Teaching

Dewey Wallace, professor of religion
A professor of religion at GW since 1974, Wallace’s principal areas of research include the religion of England in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially Puritanism, and the religious life of colonial and 19th-century America. Wallace’s courses have included world religion, the history of Christianity, and religion in the United States. He is the author of The Pilgrims and of Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology 1525-1695, and editor of The Spirituality of the Later English Puritans and The Pioneer Preacher. Wallace has served on the Faculty Senate and many university committees. He also has been chair of the Department of Religion. In 2001, he received a Bender Teaching Award.

Prize for University Service

Harry Yeide, professor of religion and director of the Peace Studies Program
Yeide has taught at GW since 1963, serving as assistant dean for the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and as chair of the Religion Department. His areas of interest include the sociology and philosophy of religion, ethics, and peace studies. Yeide played a major role in the establishment of interdisciplinary study programs including in the fields of bio-ethics and peace studies. He has written a number of articles on religion and ethics and recently published a book on classical Pietism.

GW Awards

Andrew Brown, B.A. ’06. Now a graduate student in GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs, Brown is the founder of Global Languages Group, a nonprofit student organization that provides free language classes to the GW community. Started in 2005, Global Languages now offers 120 weekly classes in 47 languages taught by nearly 130 instructors.

Rodney L. Johnson, M.A. ’93, has served GW for 22 years, including
16 years as the University’s director of parent services. Johnson’s office handles more than 10,000 calls and e-mails annually, and keeps in touch with parents through a parent services monthly e-newsletter via its listserv. Parent services holds a session for parents at Colonials Inauguration and is a key partner in staging Colonials Weekend, which 3,500 GW parents attended last year.

Omar T. Woodard, B.A. ’05, is currently a Presidential Administrative Fellow and will receive a Master of Public Administration with a focus on urban nonprofit management at this year’s Commencement. While
at GW, he has served as president pro tem of the Student Association Senate, president of the Black Student Union, and president of the Student Association. He received the 2007 Martin Luther King Jr. Award. Woodard is an outreach coordinator for GW’s Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu