Congratulations to our 21-22 Department Graduate Student Award winners

Congratulations to our 21-22 Department Graduate Student Award winners:  Cat Alexander for teaching, Trisha Douin for research, and Becca Halpryn for service.

Cat is the winner of the teaching award for the second straight year (though competition was especially high this year; ALL of our nominees are clearly excelling in the classroom!). Cat stood out, however, because of the way they pay attention to details at multiple levels of instruction. This includes paying close attention to how to make material (for a social problems course) accessible for lower-level undergrads, being explicit about learning objectives in class and structuring lectures to meet those objectives well, and mixing visual material into the presentation in ways that really helped to cement elements of the lecture in students’ minds. As the nominator themselves put it, “In a very short time, Cat has already begun to demonstrate an ease and intuitive sense about teaching and interacting with their students.”

Trisha is the winner of the research award for the second straight year. In addition to continuing to engage in productive collaborative research work with Christa Moore (a graduate of our PhD program), Trisha was a coauthor on a paper published by Dr. Gast in the International Journal of Research & Method in Education. Along with John Broadus, Trisha engaged in public sociology by publishing an op-ed in the Courier Journal on CRT. Trisha has also remained active at conferences, with a presentation at the Association for Applied & Clinical Sociology and at SSSP.

Becca’s service efforts are rich with community engaged work. In the past year, this included work with Dr. Heberle’s CEPM, wherein Becca contributed much to the 2022 State of Metropolitan Housing Report and to a 2021 evaluation of homeless services in the metro area. In collaboration with Dr. Mog of the UofL Sustainability Council, Becca helped to produce the findings from the 2022 Campus Sustainability Survey. And, in collaboration with Dr. Roelfs and John Broadus, Becca helped to revise and reshape the program logic model for the West Louisville Outdoor Recreation Initiative and began laying the groundwork for measuring how well program outcomes were being met.