The Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences honors Richard Lathrop, Janice McDonnell, Yair Rosenthal, and Silke Severmann for their “dedication and impactful work.”
The Interim Executive Dean of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Laura Lawson, has named EOAS faculty members Richard Lathrop, Janice McDonnell, Yair Rosenthal, and Silke Severmann recipients of the 27th Excellence Awards for the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS) and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES). SEBS wrote its annual awards are given to members of the school community to recognize the “dedication and impactful work” of its faculty and staff.
On the Executive Dean website, Lawson wrote about the awards, “This year, we are not able to have our traditional lunch, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize this group of amazing faculty and staff. Please join me in recognizing the 2020 Excellence award recipients. Well done!”
According to the awards website, The Excellence Award program provides SEBS with an “opportunity to acknowledge individuals and teams who have gone above and beyond an already high bar of expectation. These signature awards meet carefully-considered criteria, including creativity, original work and ideas, innovation, effectiveness, integrity, leadership, impact, community engagement, and excellence.”
EOAS Faculty Members Awarded
Richard G. Lathrop, Jr., a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, and Janice McDonnell, an associate professor and science engineering technology agent in the Department of 4-H Youth Development, received the Team Excellence Award as members of the Rutgers 4-H STEM Ambassador Team. “The Rutgers 4-H STEM Ambassador Program was established in 2009 by a team of faculty and staff from multiple SEBS/NJAES departments and units. Since then, this dedicated team has learned how to utilize the strengths and resources of each member to best serve traditionally underserved urban youth throughout the state to enrich their interest and competency in science, technology, and engineering,” according to the Excellence Awards website. More information about this award and the other recipients is here.
Yair Rosenthal, a distinguished professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, was awarded the Research Excellence Award. According to the awards website he was chosen as the recipient because “. . . he has been a leader in understanding the importance of the ocean in regulating climate, which is now informing society about our impending future on a warming planet. Yair has developed quantitative geochemical proxies providing information of past ocean properties allowing rigorous testing of our understanding of crucial Earth process. He has over 140 publications, many in the highest profile journals including Science, Nature, and Nature Geoscience. Yair has over 10,000 citations and an h-index of 58. He has been named a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an honor bestowed on only 0.1% of the members of AGU.”
Silke Severmann, an associate professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, was honored as part of the SEBS Online Mentors and Support Team, a team created to help shift to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the awards website, the team “offered individual instruction to SEBS faculty to help them choose the most appropriate technologies, to help them use the technologies, to help with remote instruction best practices, and to aid in design of remote instruction classes. The team also developed a CANVAS page called the SEBS Online Teaching Toolkit, which is a compendium of the resources at Rutgers to help further with technological and pedagogical course development.”
To learn more about the SEBS 2020 Excellence Awards, or view a complete list of the winners, click here.