2021 Excellence Award Winners

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Each year, a few individuals and teams are chosen for an Excellence Award for their exceptional contributions to Brown University and the local community. Examples of individual and team accomplishments include: unique endeavors requiring significant effort well beyond the designated scope of an employee’s position; implementation of a new or improved service or program; making a significant impact within or outside the Brown University community, and more.

Read below to learn more about the 2021 awardees.

Excellence Award for Citizenship

Grewer.jpgLichen Grewer
Facilities Management; Planning, Design and Construction

Lichen Grewer has gone above and beyond the scope of her position by taking the lead to create the University’s COVID response master schedule and work plan, which has allowed Brown to respond to the pandemic in an organized and effective way. Lichen’s efforts have ensured that students, staff, faculty and staff can continue to use the campus to work, learn and live in the midst of the COVID pandemic. In addition to preparing the response plan, Lichen provided oversight and direction to many facets of the response effort, including reviewing approximately 350 return-to-campus plans.

As a result of Lichen's efforts, classes were able to convene during Summer 2021 and classes resumed in a normal way in Fall 2021. Her planning also led to the implementation of five COVID testing centers throughout campus; audio visual enhancements in hundreds of classrooms to support remote learning; outdoor furnishings to support de-densification; the re-installation of 2,000 pieces of classroom furnishings; and campus-wide signage modifications.

Lichen personifies the Facilities Management vision statement: "We care.” She puts the best interests of the University in the forefront of all that she does and takes on additional responsibilities without being asked. She goes above and beyond the limits of her position to help make Facilities Management and Planning Design and Construction a best-in-class, high-performing organization.

Excellence Award for Diversity and Inclusion

Vieira.jpgSusan Vieria
Residential Life

After the events of June 2020, which stirred national discourse about systemic racism, Susan Vieira started a group called "Womxn to Womxn: Allies Against Racism." The group meets bimonthly to discuss topics such as white fragility, implicit bias, the privilege of vulnerability and reparations. Sue started with a simple question: "What do you want to know/understand more about?" This question allowed the group to form in an open and non-prescriptive way. Though Sue said that she is not always comfortable facilitating meetings, she bravely leads the group through sometimes difficult conversations. Sue has gathered resources and reading recommendations, including books, podcasts, articles and style guides. She holds the group accountable — members plan in advance of each meeting who will choose the next topic to discuss so that each person can take the lead in their ongoing anti-racism education. Sue has moved into a new role in a different department and has kept the group going through that transition. Approximately 75 Brown community members have been involved in the group since it was started.

 

Restrepo.jpg Tunca.pngMaria Isabel Restrepo (L) and Mete Tunca (R)
Office of Information Technology

Recently, Maria Isabel Restrepo and Mete Tunca from the Office of Information Technology led the deployment of JupyterHub compute clusters as a service for teaching and learning at Brown. Faculty can request a JupyterHub cluster for any course, and the compute resources are provisioned to their precise specification. Students only need a computer and a web browser. There is no installation of any complicated build tools or integrated development environments. This has been transformative for faculty and students. Instead of spending the entire first day (or week) of class getting a compute environment configured on their machines, they simply use their Brown credential to log on to the JupyterHub cluster that was purpose-built for them. This particularly has implications for class in departments that have historically not emphasized programming or computation. For these, reducing the up-front cost of configuring compute environments massively decreases the barrier for learning to code. 

The JupyterHub clusters have been used in dozens of classes and by many hundreds of students, and it’s expected that use will continue to increase. Developing and deploying the JupyterHub service for the University was an enormous project, on which Isabel and Mete worked tirelessly for months. Their commitment to lowering the barriers to programming made this a labor of love.

 

Schatz.jpg Teklu.jpgEllen Schatz (L) and Feven Teklu (R)
Advancement

In summer 2020, the tragic murder of George Floyd brought many members of the Brown community together to have conversations regarding the need for anti-racism training. Ellen Schatz and Feven Teklu spearheaded an effort among members of the Advancement Division. Through a series of training modules focused on various aspects of American society, the team developed a curriculum based on videos, articles and podcasts. They created an internal website to host the curriculum and guide participants through the material. They recruited volunteers to serve as facilitators and obtained funding from the University for a consultant to help prep and train the facilitators. 

More than 200 members of the division have taken part in Advancement Anti-Racism Training, and the program has been successful in shifting perspective within that sphere. Employees are more aware of, empathetic toward and fluent in systemic racism and the work they need to do to become anti-racist. This program affects their lives outside of Brown: being more vocal, having difficult conversations and taking actions to divest themselves of systems of oppression. 
All of the work Ellen and Feven have completed has been entirely outside of their job descriptions, often requiring work after hours on evenings and weekends. It has been a true investment in their community from which countless others have benefited.

Excellence Award for Efficiency

Macchi.jpgThomas Macchi
Facilities Management; Operations

Tom Macchi is an exemplary leader within Facilities Operations who took on additional responsibilities this past year. Tom consistently exceeded expectations by leading a collaborative and empowered team to respond dynamically to the ever-changing needs of the community in preparing campus for a safe reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tom’s zoned maintenance and subsequent work order distribution plan consistently yielded a work order turnaround of less than 30 days throughout the entire year. Additionally, Tom’s preventive maintenance (PM) rotation schedule enabled a 100% completion rate of all PM work orders each month, achieving the highest completion rate within Facilities Operations. 

Tom also initiated a tool inventory review and identified a number of duplicate, unused tools in Division 1 Structural Trades. Tom collaborated with teams from Purchasing, Sustainability and Stores to coordinate the donation of these spare tools to Habitat for Humanity, promoting a charitable relationship between Brown and its community. Tom overhauled the Facilities Management card access clearance levels and implemented a department-wide rollout with Access Control to achieve optimal efficiency. Tom also established and launched the first professional development program within the trades to promote learning and mobility within Division 1.

Excellence Award for Innovation

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Megan Dupre, Jarrah Fiori, Laura Kenney, Maren Nelson, Diana Richardson and Jill Rossi (L-R)
Alumni Relations

The Reunion Task Force was a team of Alumni Relations staff members who came together to brainstorm, research and plan for the first-ever Brown Virtual Reunion Weekend — welcoming a record-breaking number of Brown alumni from both the 2020 and 2021 reunion cycles. With only four short months to design and plan over 45 virtual events, the Task Force worked creatively, collaboratively and tirelessly to create the spirit of Reunion Weekend in this new virtual landscape. They worked with campus partners and newly discovered service providers and discovered several members of the alumni community to be part of the Virtual Reunion programming. 

In addition to their everyday job and responsibilities, this team took on the role of event liaisons and worked directly with class leaders to coordinate their class event details. The Task Force spent countless hours strategizing on how best to engage alumni, ensuring they would have the best possible experience in the midst of a pandemic and growing Zoom fatigue. They researched and tested numerous virtual event platforms and worked to create special virtual elements to enhance the experience — such as a virtual photo booth, virtual backgrounds, Spotify class music playlists and a virtual class reunion lounge for classmates to connect and “chat” with each other. 

Reunion Weekend at Brown is a vital connection point for alumni and an important engagement opportunity for Brown. Alumni serve as class and club volunteers, belong to alumni affinity groups, serve as mentors and serve the University as leaders, advisors and donors. In the end, more than 3,000 alumni registered for Reunion Weekend, representing nearly every U.S. state as well as 30 countries.
 

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Will Battersby, Lauren Clarke, Courtney DaCosta, Heather Forand, Danielle Izzi, Michael Malpiedi, Meghan Silvestri and Jody Soares (L-R)
Facilities Management; University Event and Conference Services

During 2021, the University Event and Conference Services team had to transition from producing virtual events to producing hybrid and socially distanced in-person events. This included onboarding a new virtual events platform for conferences, creating protocols and procedures for safe, socially distanced check-ins and move-ins for students returning to campus, reimagining ceremonies such as the Van Wickle Walk and planning a socially distanced Commencement. In order to provide in-person experiences that also included people who could not attend, they essentially had to double their workload on each event in order to cover both the virtual and in-person experiences. They also served as leaders in consulting other campus departments on how to make their events safe and engaging.   


This team served tirelessly, supporting an unprecedented number of events and ensuring that the community could continue to engage as safely as possible. They applied ingenuity to their work and never blinked in the face of a challenge to use the tools they were given to reimagine their approach. The result was continued engagement on the campus that provided students, faculty and staff with opportunities to gather as a community, mark major milestones, hold important meetings and lectures and uphold campus traditions.
 

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Jason Cornell, Xue Di, Ryan Dwyer, Tsurugi Ebii, Hannah Elliot, Giovanna Roz Gastaldi, Paul Marsella, Connor Meegan, Kyle Nicholson, Louis Oppenheimer, Paul Rochford Jr. and Kyle Sloane (L-R)
Media Services

In an uncertain year, Media Services was a crucial partner in the planning for a virtual celebration of both BEAR Day and Staff Development Day 2021 when it was clear the community would not be able to gather in person. Media Services played a critical role in the creative development of the BEAR Day ceremony concept, advising on the run of show, theme, format, music and more. They pivoted seamlessly as the concept shifted from live to fully recorded, something Media Services had not done before the pandemic. For Staff Development Day, the team helped devise a strategy for the four-day series of virtual events, with multiple presenters, more attendees than anticipated and more than 10 hours of live sessions. As a result of this team’s efforts, the staff community was able to gather and connect for two of the University’s most enduring employee programs.

Beyond these two events, Media Services expanded its services to guide the University through the use of Zoom meetings and webinars for instruction, communication and community gathering. Through their outstanding service (in collaboration with Events and Conference Services, the IT Service Center and Digital Learning and Design), the campus was able to transition from in-person, to fully remote, then to hybrid activities. Classes continued and virtual events became the standard for departments to maintain engagement with their target audience. Media Services staffed more than 1,000 virtual events, hosting providers of live captions and ASL interpreting for more than 160 events and helping the University maintain high standards of accessibility throughout the year.

Excellence Award for Leadership

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Oludurotimi Adetunji, Sarah Brown, Matthew Donato, Ashley Greene, Julia Issa, Aaron Karp, Aixa Kidd, Besenia Rodriguez, Gregory Seiler, Betsy Shimberg, Linda Sutherland and Elena Vasquez (L-R)
The College; CareerLAB and Swearer Center

In Spring 2020, many Brown students’ summer plans were canceled due to the pandemic. Dedicated people across the College joined with donors to support student opportunities amid uncertainty. This collaboration created SPRINTs (Summer/Semester Projects for Research, Internship, Teaching) — short-term projects offered by Brown faculty, alumni, friends and Providence-area community partners — that yielded nearly 500 stipended opportunities for students. The team behind SPRINT transformed the funding model to be more equity-based; simplified the application process by pulling all opportunities into one UFunds-based format; streamlined questions on the application, reducing the burden on students; aligned dates and deadlines; reallocated gift and endowment funds to SPRINT; and improved training for SPRINT faculty and staff reviewers to prioritize a holistic review of student applications.

Summer opportunities have a lasting impact on Brown students, who, in turn, make contributions that enhance faculty research, community-based efforts and the work generated in low-paying or unpaid fields. Thus, the changes to the SPRINT program had an enormous, multiplier effect. The entire team’s willingness to innovate and to work collaboratively to try something new while managing the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic is most impressive.

Excellence Award for Rising Star

Elliot.pngHannah Elliot
Media Services

In her short time at Brown, Hannah Elliot has been instrumental in leading the Brown community to a strong level of comfort and support using Zoom for effective teaching, learning and events. She created the Zoom scheduling workflow for campus and co-created the Zoom buddy program to support faculty teaching with Zoom. Hannah’s Zoom scheduling workflow impacted the positive planning and execution of more than 1,000 virtual events supported by Media Services; Hannah created a simple and efficient system to keep track of panelist keys and Zoom links for webinars, and collaborated with University Event and Conference Services to include the information in their event plans. 
Hannah is an excellent student supervisor and has already made a positive impact with her coaching and training of Media Services student technicians. She also supervised the work of two Event support staff, Courtney DaCosta and Heather Forand, via the work-share program. Courtney and Heather became her collaborators and contributed to the great success of the virtual event support team.

Hannah played a key role in keeping Brown operating effectively during FY21, when the event operations became virtual, while 500 courses moved to hybrid. She kept the standards of support for virtual events very high, as demonstrated by a great number of satisfied customers.

 

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Latasha Johnson
Pre-College and Undergraduate Programs

In her relatively short tenure at Brown, Latasha Johnson has developed and implemented ways to systematize a number of the division’s processes to ensure they are efficient, equitable and easy to navigate for the thousands of young students and athletes the team interacts with each year. Latasha oversees housing, dining logistics, general support and accommodations for 6,000 pre-college students and 3,000 sports campers each summer — work that is managed by multiple offices at the undergraduate level. This work requires months of iterative and detailed planning. The logistics of ensuring students are in appropriate spaces and supported by accommodations if necessary is incredibly complex, with a new group of students arriving seven different times throughout the summer. The efficiencies Latasha has built in each of these processes have freed up substantial amounts of time for her and her colleagues.

Latasha has developed positive and highly constructive working relationships with departments across the University (including the Department of Public Safety, Office of Residential Life, Health Services, Dining Services, Facilities Management and Student Accommodations Services, among others). During the 2020-21 academic year, Latasha went above and beyond to assist Student Accessibility Services with processing a high volume of accommodations related to COVID-19 issues. This allowed that department to meet demands without hiring additional staff. 

Latasha also dedicates significant time and energy to supporting broader University initiatives — serving as a University hearing officer and a member of the multi-partial team.

Excellence Award for Service

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Grace Ayers, Christina Bonney, Alana Chetlen, Ita Irizarry, Vanessa Sherman and Sheila Vandal (L-R)
Office of Research Integrity

The Human Research Protection Program (HRPP) team is responsible for facilitating compliance with federal human subjects research regulations and related policies, and serves a broad swath of the Brown community, including undergraduate, graduate and medical students and faculty. Over the past year, the HRPP team was very intentional about soliciting community feedback to expand its services, improve efficiency and evolve policies and processes to best meet the needs of its diverse stakeholders. The team created new templates for researchers for studies involving children, introduced an intake checklist that improved time to approval for newly submitted protocol, and released a portfolio of resources for investigators to make self-determinations of non-human subjects research to expedite implementation of new studies. 

The team also launched a "Quick Pulse" survey initiative, which enabled researchers with recently approved protocols to provide real-time, anonymous feedback about their experience with the HRPP and the Institutional Review Board (IRB). These data reflect a high level of satisfaction with HRPP's services, while constructive feedback led to the development of a highly rated and well-utilized "TEA Time" (Troubleshooting and Expert Advice) program offering. One of the team's biggest accomplishments was the development of a new IRB position statement to support the use of sexual orientation- and gender-inclusive language in all Brown human subjects research studies.

 

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Mather.pngKarey Majka (L) and Lisa Mather (R)
Office of the Registrar

The Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 academic course offerings were already being planned and uploaded when Brown moved to remote operations in March 2020. Karey Majka and Lisa Mather are the registrar’s office liaisons to department managers, and they clearly communicated each of the changes to course building as staff revised almost all of the course offerings for fall and spring and added a third summer semester. Lisa and Karey flawlessly led those who build, schedule and revise courses for their departments, providing reliably professional and friendly customer service throughout. Because of Karey and Lisa’s clear communication, instructions, never-ending patience, almost immediate responses and moral support, Brown students and faculty enjoyed well-scheduled semesters despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. Karey and Lisa were the frontline bearers who guided academic units through unprecedented circumstances.

 

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Christine Benvie, Sean Broestl, Donna Butler, Deborah Dunphy, Wrenford Johnson, Emily Kasbohm, Amy Sanderson (not pictured), Melissa Skinnell, Tanya Sullivan, Heather Vacher and Sumner Warren (L-R)
Emergency Medical Services (EMS), Facilities Management, Office of Information Technology

The team coordinating COVID-19 quarantine/isolation services is a multi-divisional team of talented, compassionate and dedicated staff. Staff from Health Services worked to ensure that the clinical needs of each student were taken into account, and provided feedback to Office of Information Technology staff on the functionality of the system. Amy Sanderson, the chief of Brown EMS, and her crew worked tirelessly to transport students and belongings, deliver meals and do the all-around work of answering questions and alleviating the anxieties of students from being placed into quarantine or isolation. Chefs and staff at Dining Services made custom meals for each student. Staff from Facilities Management ensured spaces got cleaned and offered feedback about how the system could be improved. Staff from the Office of Residential Life collaborated with the group to make sure that adequate housing was set aside for this purpose and kept the group updated with any changes to the inventory from semester to semester. This core team, who called themselves the Temporary Resource Management (TRM) Service Providers, also collaborated with the Office of Information Technology to develop an app to more effectively and efficiently oversee the student quarantine and isolation process. The app allowed students to safely and quickly communicate with staff about their needs and allowed staff to monitor the number of students in isolation, keep track of isolation bed availability and more.  

Together, the team ensured that students were well taken care of during their time in quarantine/isolation housing. The result was student care and support that served as a model for other Rhode Island institutions of higher education. Students experienced the highest quality of care and compassion not only from the members of the team but from the staff that this team supervises. The University’s operation was contingent on its ability to safely move on-campus students into separate housing when they got COVID or were exposed to someone with COVID, and the ability to support off-campus students during their times of self-quarantine/isolation at their private residence. Without the strength, communication, clinical skill, collaboration, innovation and good will of this tireless team the student experience would have collapsed under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 

Kun.pngBianca Kun
Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry

Bianca Kun goes above and beyond in her role as laboratory manager. Throughout the pandemic, she has demonstrated incredible work ethic and perseverance despite an ever-mounting workload. She almost singlehandedly ran the lab during the COVID shutdown. While many remained wary of resuming in-person work, Bianca came in throughout the pandemic, sometimes seven days a week, and managed everything. As work in the lab ramped up with everyone returning, Bianca took on the enormous project of generating and maintaining a large batch of senescent cells, which required meticulous care and attention over a period of months. This project has been an incredible resource that fuels the work of several graduate students and postdocs and is at the core of the department’s research goals. 

Bianca has also led efforts to clean and organize the laboratory, thus making everyone’s work more productive. She completes the tasks and leads the efforts that often get pushed to the side by others while still going above in her own job.

Without Bianca’s contribution, the laboratories would have completely shut down during COVID, resulting in the loss of years of work, including generated materials, cell lines, and mouse colonies. Her efforts during this time prevented delayed graduations and publications for numerous researchers. They also generated preliminary data for grants in a timely fashion that sustained funding for the laboratory.