2012

2011-12 Faculty Member of the Year Award: Virginia Hettinger

Dr. Virginia Hettinger’s path to an academic career took many twists and turns. She graduated from Indiana University with a double major in economics and folklore. Like many liberal arts majors at the time, she had little sense of what to do next or even how to go about finding something to do next.

After a brief stint as a retail manager and assistant buyer, Dr. Hettinger earned a Masters in Public Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her second career took her to the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget and then the Virginia Department of Education. In both agencies she worked on evaluation projects and program reviews. Dr. Hettinger loved working on solutions for problems in areas as diverse as child support, educational equity, prison and jail population growth, and Medicaid expenditure growth, but she also wished to concentrate her focus on the questions she found most interesting as opposed to those deemed important by legislators and bureaucrats. Graduate school called to her again. Continue reading

2012 Distinguished Alumni Award: Marian Kennedy

After completing her undergraduate psychology Honors degree at the University of Connecticut in 1970, Marian Kennedy moved to California with a fellow Honors student. A year later she began law school at the University of Santa Clara. In 1974 she interned with the California Supreme Court, and has worked as an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board. In 1979 she entered Harvard Law School to complete her Master of Laws degree before moving to The Netherlands to marry a Dutch citizen she had met at Harvard. From 1981 to 1992, the couple worked in California, New York City, and The Netherlands. They also had two children, Nicole and Robert. Continue reading

2009-10 Faculty Member of the Year Award: Robert Thorson

Dr. Robert Thorson earned his B.S. from Bemidji State College, his M.S. from the University of Alaska, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He is a professor of geology in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Anthropology, specializing in integrated geoscience, kettle lakes, and stone walls. He has been heavily involved with the Honors Program since the Spring of 2001, when he was a candidate for the Directorship of the Honors Program. That fall, he created an elective science course for Honors students, Current Issues in Environmental Science, one that is still being taught today. In 2004, he became fully invested with developing and teaching a new breed of interdisciplinary honors courses, creating Geoscience Through American Studies, the first course for what would later become the Honors Core curriculum. Continue reading