And the Awards Go to . . .

Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, received the Susan Colver Rosenberger Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the university’s faculty. The medal, presented for the first time in 1925, honors Dr. Simmons on her tenth anniversary as Brown’s president.

Dr. Simmons is a graduate of Dillard University in New Orleans and holds a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University.

Joan Hinde Stewart, president of Hamilton College, received the 2011 Posse Star award from the Posse Foundation, the nonprofit organization that identifies high achieving public high school students from underrepresented groups and matches them with partner colleges. This is the tenth year that Hamilton has accepted students in conjunction with the Posse Foundation.

A summa cum laude graduate of St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, New York, President Stewart earned a Ph.D. at Yale University. Her latest book, The Enlightenment of Age, a study of women and aging in early modern France, was published in 2010.

Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the winner of the 2011 George Washington Book Prize for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. The $50,000 prize is given for the best book about America’s founding era. The award is cosponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate.

Professor Maier is the author of five previous books on the Revolutionary War era. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

The Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship (WISE) center at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, received the Women’s Business Center of Excellence Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The center is under the direction of Joanne Lenweaver.