Five Women Professors Honored With Notable Awards and Prizes

Peppi Kenny, professor of finance at Western Illinois University in Macomb, received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academy of Finance at the academy’s annual meeting in Chicago.

Professor Kenny is a graduate of Texas A&M University, where she majored in accounting. She earned an MBA and a Ph.D. in finance at Oklahoma State University.

Karen Sowers, the Alvin and Sally Beaman Endowed Professor and dean of the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, has been selected to receive the 2016 George Goodman and Ruth P. Brudney Social Work Award from Mental Health America. Dean Sowers will be presented with the award at the organization’s annual meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, in June.

Dr. Sowers joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 1997 after teaching at Florida International University in Miami. She is a graduate of the University of Central Florida in Orlando and holds a master of social work degree and a doctorate in social work from Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Anna S. Lok, the Alice Lohrman Andrews Research Professor in Hepatology at the University of Michigan, received the 2016 William Beaumont Prize in Gastroenterology from the American Gastroenterological Association. She was honored for her pioneering research on liver disease.

Dr. Lok is the president-elect of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. She was trained at the University of Hong Kong and the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Claudia Gunsch, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has won the 2016 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dr. Gunsch was honored for “pioneering the development of gene silencing based water disinfection technology.”

Dr. Gunsch is a graduate of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She holds a master’s degree from Clemson University in South Carolina and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Marie Bakitas, who holds the Marie L. O’Koren Endowed Chair at the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Nursing and is the associate director of the university’s Center for Palliative and Supportive Care, was recently honored by the Oncology Nursing Society and the Hospice and Palliative Nursing Association.

Dr. Bakitas is a graduate of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. She holds a master’s degree from Boston University and a doctorate in nursing science from Yale University.