Provost Office Faculty Awards

Every year, through rigorous reviews by panels of fellow faculty, we honor those among us who model the success that all academics seek. On November 9, we will celebrate these colleagues with a more formal ceremony (as well as this year’s Provost Distinguished Associate Professors previously announced here ), but this post reveals those who will carry these honors this year.

Provost Innovation in Teaching Award:
Pam Biernacki, DNP, FNP-BC, Associate Professor, GU School of Nursing
Lois Wessel, DNP, FNP-BC, Professor, GU School of Nursing
Elke Zschaebitz, DNP, ARPN, Assistant Professor, GU School of Nursing

The Virtual Interprofessional Education (VIPE) Consortium, created at several universities including Georgetown School of Nursing, developed an educational method that can be shared and replicated to create online, interprofessional experiences using a virtual communications/meeting platform, such as Zoom or Teams. The VIPE program is grounded in several learning theories, problem-based learning, and case-based learning, as well as the notion that IPE and collaborative practice lend themselves to collaborative problem solving where there is not one single correct solution, encouraging students to solve problems in the context of a collaborative interprofessional group.

Career Research Achievement Award:
Suzanne Stetkevych, Ph.D, Professor, College of Arts & Sciences

Prof. Stetkevych joined the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies in 2012, and was named the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair in 2014. Prof. Stetkevych has produced four landmark volumes in the study of Arabic poetry. In addition to these books, Prof. Stetkevych has produced a steady stream of forty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. These have appeared in the premier journals for Arabic literature and Arabic and Islamic history and elsewhere. Additionally, she served dynamically as the editor of one of the field’s two scholarly journals (The Journal of Arabic Literature) for a decade. Many of her former students are now tenured faculty across North America, Europe and the Arab world. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Center in Egypt, the American Center for Oriental Research in Jordan, and others. In 2017, she won the Middle East Medievalists Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she and her husband were co-awarded the coveted Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Last year, Prof. Stetkevych received a truly massive honor — the King Faisal Prize in Arabic Language and Literature.

Distinguished Achievement in Research Award:
Gregory Afinogenov, Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Sciences

Professor Gregory Afinogenov is recognized for his prize-winning book, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’ Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press, 2020). The book is the winner of three awards thus far: the 2020 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize bestowed by Harvard University Press on the year’s best first book published with the press; the 2021 W. Bruce Lincoln Prize (awarded for “an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past” by this country’s main professional association of Slavic Studies scholars—the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies); and the Independent Publisher Book Awards’ 2021 Gold Medal in the category of World History. Afinogenov is likely one of the few people in the world with the breadth and depth of linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge necessary to have undertaken a multi-archival project on the history of Russo-Chinese relations over the course of the 17th- to-19th centuries. The excitement around Professor Afinogenov’s book is a reflection of its striking interpretive originality.

Sonnenborn Chairs honor collaborative teams of faculty.

Sonneborn Interdisciplinary Collaboration Chair #1:
Lisa Singh, Professor, Computer Science Department, College of Arts & Sciences; McCourt School of Public Policy
Katharine Donato, Professor of International Migration, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
Ali Arab, Associate Professor, Mathematics and Statistics Department, College of Arts & Sciences

This collaborative team of a computer scientist, a demographer, and a statistician are developing a conceptual and computational framework to predict forced human migration, one of the world’s pressing problems. The framework accounts for 1) variation in the influences on forced migration across time and space, 2) differences in the influences across initial moves and secondary moves, 3) and differences in the types of forces migration contexts (e.g., war, famine, extreme weather). Using a computationally-driven grounded theory approach, their work examines how different drivers interact at different stages of migration. They combine organic data from Google searches, daily events, and social media platforms with traditional administrative and survey data, to develop computational models that account for the unique spatial-temporal dependencies in various migration situations.

Sonneborn Interdisciplinary Collaboration Chair #2:
Rogaia Abusharaf, Professor of Anthropology, GU-Q
Ananya Chakravarti, Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Sciences
Cóilín Parsons, Professor, Department of English, College of Arts & Sciences

This collaborative team of an anthropologist, historian, and an English professor has been actively studying the Indian Ocean region, home to nearly half the world’s population. This region has acted as a connective tissue globally through the movement of goods, peoples, religious beliefs, and intellectual ideas. The three chairs have collaborated over almost a decade, blending their specialties together for alternative perspectives on the region. This collaboration has been facilitated by the Indian Ocean Working Group founded at GU-Q in 2014. This collaboration has produced dozens of research products and most recently led to a new academic journal, Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, with the team collaborating on editorial duties. The team has collaborated on teaching through the Global Classroom and Global Humanities Seminars. The team will extend their collaboration to a new set of students, Indian Ocean Fellows, creating new collaborations between students in DC and Doha, through co-taught seminars. In a real sense, this team will create a interdisciplinary laboratory on the Indian Ocean region.


When you next encounter any of these colleagues, convey our pride in their accomplishments!