Six Women Scholars Have Been Selected to Receive Notable Awards

Heather Shotton, an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma, has been named educator of the year by the National Indian Education Association. Dr. Shotton is the co-editor of Beyond the Asterisk: Understanding Native Students in Higher Education (Stylus Publishing, 2013).

Dr. Shotton holds a bachelor’s degree in Native American studies, a master’s degree in human relations, and a Ph.D. in adult and higher education, all from the University of Oklahoma.

Jackie Luedtke, an associate professor of applied aviation sciences at the Prescott, Arizona, campus of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, received the V.L. Laursen Award for outstanding contributions to aerospace education from the University Aviation Association.

Dr. Luedtke holds a Ph.D. in higher education from Oklahoma State University.

Monica Olvera de la Cruz, the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and the director of the Center for the Computation and Theory of Soft Materials at Northwestern University in Illinois, has been selected to receive the 2017 Polymer Physics Prize from the American Physical Society. Professor Olvera de la Cruz will be honored at the society’s meeting in March for her “outstanding contributions to the theoretical understanding of polymers.”

Dr. Olvera de la Cruz joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1986. She is a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge in England.

Severine Van Slambrouck, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at South Dakota State University, received the Spandidos Publications Award for Outstanding Achievement and Presentation in Advances in Oncology at the 21st World Congress on Advances in Oncology recently held in Athens, Greece.

Dr. Van Slambrouck joined the faculty at South Dakota State in 2015 after teaching at Saint Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida. She is a graduate of Ghent University in Belgium and holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and biochemistry from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Leah Ceccarelli, a professor of communication at the University of Washington, has received the 2016 Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association.

Professor Ceccarelli joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 2013. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in communication studies from Northwestern University.

Leona Sevick, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Bridgewater College in Virginia, has been selected to receive the 2017 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Dr. Sevick is being honored for her poetry collection – Lion Brothers – that will be published by Press 53 in the spring.

Dr. Sevick became provost at Bridgewater College this past summer. Previously, she associate provost and an associate professor of English at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. Dr Sevick is a graduate of McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland.