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Soraya M. Coley, president of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has been selected to receive the 2023 Donna Shavlik Award from the American Council on Education. She will be honored at the Women’s Leadership Dinner at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
The American Council on Education established the Donna Shavlik Award to commemorate the long and outstanding service of Donna Shavlik, former director of ACE’s Office of Women in Higher Education. Presented annually, the award honors an individual who demonstrates a sustained commitment to advancing women in higher education through leadership and career development.
“Throughout her decades-long career, President Coley has demonstrated a sustained and continuing commitment to the advancement of women through actions or initiatives enhancing women’s leadership development,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. “President Coley’s unwavering dedication to advancing women in higher education exemplifies the spirit behind the ACE Donna Shavlik award.”
Dr. Coley has spent nearly her entire career in the California State University system, rising from lecturer to a tenured faculty member, department chair, dean, provost, and president. She is the first woman and first African American scholar to serve as president of Cal Poly Pomona.
Before being named president of Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Coley was provost and vice president for academic affairs at California State University, Bakersfield. Earlier in her career, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Alliant International University and as dean of the College of Human Development and Community Service at California State University, Fullerton.
Dr. Coley is a graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where she majored in sociology. She holds a master’s degree in social planning and social work and a Ph.D. in social planning and policy from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Ella Nora Phillips was born in Stringtown, West Virginia, in 1893. She had planned to become a teacher but decided to marry Charles Phillips who was a chauffeur in Pittsburgh. The couple had a daughter who died from whooping cough. Then Phillips Myers applied to the School of Pharmacy at the University of Pittsburgh. But she was rejected. She persisted and eventually was admitted in 1914. In the classroom, White males had the first rows of seats, and they were followed, in descending order, by White females, then Jews, then Blacks. She graduated in 1916 and became the first Black woman to practice pharmacy in Pennsylvania.
Myers established a drugstore in Pittsburgh before marrying fellow Pitt pharmacy graduate William Stewart in 1920. She changed her name to Ella P. Stewart. After moving to Ohio, she became the first Black pharmacist and employee to work at Youngstown City Hospital. Later, she and her husband then opened Toledo’s first Black-owned and operated drugstore.
Now the University of Pittsburgh is recognizing Stewart by naming a conference room in her honor. A portrait of Stewart commissioned by the university will hang on a wall of the conference room.
Stewart died in 1987. Her papers and memorabilia are held in archives at the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University. An elementary school in Toledo was named in her honor.
The Bancroft Prize is one of the nation’s top honors in the field of American history. The prizes are awarded annually by Columbia University for books published in the previous year, and judged by a panel of distinguished historians “in terms of scope, significance, depth of research, and richness of interpretation that they present in the areas of American history and diplomacy.” The prize includes a $10,000 award.
This year, one of the three winners is Black.
Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Chair of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was honored for her book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W.W. Norton, 2022). The book is an “ambitious and exciting study of the Mexican Revolution as both Mexican and American history focused on the liberal-turned-anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and the radical men and women that surrounded him,” according to the prize committee.
Dr. Lytle Hernández is also the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernández is the director and principal investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-driven research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.
Professor Lytle Hernández is s graduate of the University of California, San Diego and earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles
The Dan David Prize is awarded by the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University in Israel to up to nine early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The honor comes with a $300,000 prize. The prize was established in 2001 by Dan David, who lived through Nazi and Communist persecution in his native Romania before becoming a global business leader and philanthropist. The prize has the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. The prize is given in recognition of the winners’ contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors.
Of this year’s nine winners, two are Black scholars with university affiliations in the United States.
Saheed Aderinto is a professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at Florida International University. Professor Aderinto describes himself as a serial methodologist and decompartmentalizing historian who adopts multiple disciplinary tools in understanding the past while blending different genres of history to reveal the complexities of people and events that came before us.
Dr. Aderinto has written a number of books, including When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, January 2018), and Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a book and making a documentary about the history of Fuji music in Nigeria.
Professor Aderinto is a graduate of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian who explores women’s social, economic, and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world. Dr. Jones-Rogers’ research has been primarily concerned with women and slavery, but her work also explores the evolution and development of early systems of law, especially as they pertain to women, bondage, and the slave trade.
Dr. Jones-Rogers is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019), which draws on the testimonies of enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals, legal, financial, and military records as well as an array of other narrative sources to show how White married women – a group historically seen as legally disempowered and economically dispossessed – exercised extraordinary power in and over enslaved African-Americans’ lives.
Dr. Jones-Rogers earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree in American history, and a Ph.D. in history all from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Elizabeth Armstrong-Mensah, clinical associate professor in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has been honored with the 2023 Early Career Teaching Excellence Award from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. The honor is given to one faculty member each year from among the 138 member institutions in the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. The award recognizes faculty for outstanding teaching and mentoring of students in public health research, teaching, and practice.
“My passion for teaching and mentoring is rooted in the fact that I want every student I teach or mentor to excel,” Dr. Armstrong-Mensah said. “When I was a student in college, I benefited immensely from faculty who were passionate about the courses they taught. Their approach helped me excel in my studies. When I became a faculty member, I remembered how I had been taught and decided to pay it forward.”
Through the Undergraduate and Graduate Research and Publications Club, Dr. Armstrong-Mensah works with students to develop research that addresses a range of public health challenges. To date, more than 100 students have participated in the club, with more than 50 students publishing peer-reviewed research publications that advance knowledge as part of their club engagement experience.
“Dr. Armstrong-Mensah is dedicated to ensuring that students have learning experiences — both inside the classroom and out — that prepare them to make a difference in the health of communities,” said School of Public Health Dean Rodney Lyn. “I am thrilled that she has been recognized with this significant honor.”
Dr. Armstrong-Mensah joined the faculty at Georgia State University in 2017 after working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and teaching at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in international affairs from the University of Ghana. She earned a Ph.D. in international affairs and development from Clark Atlanta University.
C. Denise Okafor, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry at Pennsylvania State University has been selected as a recipient of the 2023 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Mason Award commemorates the late chemist Marion Tuttle Milligan Mason, who wanted to support the advancement of women in the chemical sciences. The Mason Award is a highly competitive award that attracts applications from the very best early-career female chemists across the country. First awarded in 2015, the Mason Award has funded the research of 18 scientists who represent a diverse range of specialties within the chemical sciences.
Dr. Okafor’s research combines computational and experimental investigations to develop a fundamental understanding of how protein function is regulated. She investigates the structural mechanisms of signaling and regulation in protein complexes and uses simulations to determine how conformational dynamics of proteins are altered in different functional states.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2020, Dr. Okafor was a postdoctoral researcher at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta from 2015 to 2019.
Dr. Okafor earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical chemistry at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She holds a master’s degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics at Princeton University in New Jersey, has received two prizes for his first scholarly book, Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton University Press, 2020). The book places religion at the heart of the Roman Republic’s transformation during the fourth and third centuries and shows how religious ritual and observance bound Romans together at a time of rapid expansion and imperial violence.
Divine Institutions was awarded the 2022 American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize (given for an author’s first book in European history from ancient times through 1815) and was co-recipient of the 2022 Classical Association of the Middle West and South’s First Book Prize.
Prior to his first academic publications, Dr. Padilla Peralta had written the memoir, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin Press, 2015).
Dr. Padilla Peralta is a graduate of Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been selected as the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
The Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize was created in 2007 by the late Professor Joseph B. Gittler to recognize outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic, and/or religious relations. The annual award includes a $25,000 prize and a medal.
“Through her work as a leading academic, sociologist, and writer, Tressie McMillan Cottom brings critical perspective and analysis to some of the greatest social challenges we face today,” said Brandeis University President Ron Liebowitz.
Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2020, Dr. McMillan Cottom was an associate professor in the department of sociology in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017), and Thick: And Other Essays (The New Press, 2019).
Professor McMillan Cottom is a graduate of North Carolina Central University, where she majored in English and political science. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University in Atlanta.
Robert D. Bullard, Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University in Houston, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The award honors outstanding leaders (both academics and practitioners) who have made significant contributions to the advancement of sustainability in higher education over their lifetimes. Dr. Bullard is the fifth recipient of this award.
“It is indeed a great honor to be named winner of the AASHE Lifetime Achievement Award,” Dr. Bullard said. “I accept this award on behalf of and in recognition of the many individuals and organizations I’ve worked in partnership with over the past four decades — who sacrificed, struggled, and persevered in pursuit of dismantling and eradicating injustice wherever and whenever we saw it.”
From 2011 to 2016, Dr. Bullard was dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University. Prior to coming to TSU he was the founding director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.
Dr. Bullard is the author or co-author of many books including Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Westview Press, 1990) and The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities (New York University Press, 2012).
Dr. Bullard is a graduate of Alabama A&M University. He earned a master’s degree at Atlanta University and a Ph.D. in sociology from Iowa State University.
Miriam Mobley Smith, interim dean of the Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo received the Distinguished Leader Award from the American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists. The honor, which recognizes contributions to excellence in pharmacy practice leadership in acute and ambulatory care settings, was presented to Dr. Mobley Smith at the organization’s annual exhibition in Las Vegas.
Dr. Mobley Smith has helped promote pharmacy as an essential component of interprofessional patient care teams through her service as chair of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Advisory Panel on Outreach and Education and as a member of committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Dr. Mobley Smith officially stepped into the pharmacy college’s interim dean role last spring. Prior to coming to the University of Hawai’i, the veteran pharmacy academic served as interim dean and visiting professor at the Northeastern University Bourvé College of Health Sciences in Boston and as dean and tenured professor at the Chicago State University College of Pharmacy.
Dr. Mobley Smith is a graduate of the University of Michigan. She earned her doctorate of pharmacy degree with high honors at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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