Faculty Win Prestigious Awards
Dee Boersma wins one of 10 Heinz awards for work on the environment
 UW Conservationist Dee Boersma at the Punta Tombo penguin reserve in Argentina. |
University of Washington conservationist Dee Boersma is among 10 recipients of the Heinz Family Foundation awards given to people whose achievements have fostered a cleaner, greener and more sustainable world.
Each recipient will receive $100,000 and a medallion inscribed with the image of the late Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., whose environmental legacy is commemorated by the awards.
Boersma, a UW biology professor who holds the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science, is being honored for her extensive field study of penguins and other sea birds to promote conservation and understanding human impact on marine environments.
For more than 25 years she has operated the Penguin Project, studying Magellanic penguins at the Punta Tombo reserve in Argentina. She has dubbed the penguins "marine sentinels" for their warning signs about the ocean environment.
Her recent work has shown that, because of climate change and other factors, during the critical period of egg incubation the penguins at Punta Tombo must swim an average of 25 miles further in search of food than they did just 10 years ago.
The Heinz Foundation also cited Boersma for launching Conservation Magazine, a publication she sees as building better public communication on issues of the natural world (see www.conservationmagazine.org).
The awards, announced Sept. 15, were established in 1993 to honor Heinz's legacy on environmental issues.
To learn more about the award, go to the Heinz website.
 Emily Bender, assistant professor of linguistics |
Emily Bender recieves the R1edu award for the MA program
Emily Bender, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and head of the Computational Linguistics Program received an R1edu award recognizing her efforts in shaping the fee-based MA program together with UWEO.
Presented annually, The R1edu Award for Distinguished Faculty Contributions to Online Learning acknowledges innovative and stellar work of faculty in online learning at member institutions of the R1edu consortium.
The professional Master's program in Computational Linguistics has both a fee-based component and a GOF-funded component. Students in the program master the development of applications in translation, speech recognition, automated e-mail response, search engines and other pioneering technologies. Each year, the Computational Linguistics cohort completes their program by working together to tackle a single computational linguistics goal. Previous cohorts have worked on language-independent part-of-speech tagging systems, question answering systems, and a dialogue system-a conversational computer program that you can talk to, and it will reply.
For more information on the award, visit the R1edu website.
