Bennion Center honors faculty with Distinguished Faculty Service Award

The Bennion Center is thrilled to announce this year’s Bennion Center Faculty Award Winners, and we offer congratulations and gratitude for their incredible service to University of Utah students and Utah communities.

The Bennion Center Distinguished Faculty Service Award honors faculty members who have demonstrated sustained commitment to the campus-community connection through a life of active, unpaid community service and the integration of service with research and teaching. This year the Bennion Center is honoring two exceptional faculty members with the 2022 Distinguished Faculty Service Award: Professor Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez, of the Education Culture and Society Department, College of Education, and Professor Steven Bartlett, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering.

Professor Alvarez Gutiérrez has spent her career innovating and implementing equity-focused family-school partnerships and conducting community-based research that, in the words of one of her many community partners, “goes far beyond the scope of her job for the betterment of our community.” Her consistent excellence in advocating for engagement of culturally and linguistically diverse families in educational decision-making is particularly noteworthy.      

Professor Bartlett has an impressive record of facilitating meaningful hands-on experiences for students that meet real public need. According to his College of Engineering colleague, Professor David Eckhoff, Dr. Bartlett’s “ability to immerse students in real-life civil engineering problems” has facilitated deep student and community learning, better prepared student’s for professional practice, and established lasting connections between the UofU and many community partners.

This year’s Public Service Professor Award winner is Professor Ana Antunes in the School of Cultural and Social Transformation, Gender Studies Division. This significant award is designed to help a faculty member strengthen community-engaged learning experiences and foster stronger partnerships with the local community. Professor Antunes has demonstrated sustained commitment to community engaged pedagogy centered on gender and sexuality education for youth in our west-side communities. She is utilizing this $7500 award to launch a program in partnership with the Sunnyvale Neighborhood Center focused “on using digital technology as a means to enhance access to medically accurate knowledge about gender and sexuality, critical media literacy skills, and public health information”. Professor Antunes has established a strong, long-term relationship with this community partner and has also partnered with the School of Medicine to build curriculum for the program.

 

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