HGSE Community Members Receive Honors and Awards

This past spring, a number of Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty, students, and alumni were recognized for their hard work and achievements with awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees.

Below is a look at some of the prestigious honors awarded to members of the HGSE community:

• Professor Emerita Patricia Albjerg Graham, previously Harvard’s Charles Warren Research Professor of the History of American Education, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at Harvard University Commencement this year. Graham joined the HGSE faculty in 1974, and in 1982 became the first woman at the university to be named dean of a whole faculty when she was named dean of HGSE.
• Katie Davis, Ed.M.’02, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D.’11, received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the NSF. The award provided will support Davis’ research over five years to investigate how networked technologies can be leveraged to develop leaners’ STEM identities and connect their STEM learning across informal and formal contexts.
• Ph.D. candidate Clint Smith was awarded 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship. Recipients are selected based on “demonstrated potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise.”
• Doctoral student Bethany Mulimbi, Ed.M.’12, was awarded a 2014–2015 Fulbright Scholarship for work in Botswana. Mulimbi has been pursuing research on access and quality of education in Africa since her undergraduate career, and has more recently focused specifically on Botswana’s stability and peace to understand how education can foster such environments.
• Human Development and Education doctoral candidate Maleka Donaldson Gramling, Ed.M.’11, Ed.M.’14, was one of four students to receive the Julius B. Richmond Fellowship from the Center on the Developing Child. Gramling’s research focuses on the role of mistakes in learning and, in particular, how teachers and students respond to student mistakes.
• Audrey Jackson, Ed.M.’14, received the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year award. Jackson, a teacher at Jamaica Plain’s Joseph P. Manning Elementary School, is the 54th person to receive the award, and only the seventh from Boston Public Schools.
• Linda Duevel, Ed.M.’91, is the 2015 recipient of the International Superintendent of the Year award, as well as the European Council of International Schools (ECIS) Award for the Promotion of International Education. Duevel works at the International School of Stavanger in Norway.
• Professor Howard Gardner was named the 2015 Brock International Prize in Education Laureate, which is awarded annually to individuals who have made a specific innovation or contribution resulting in a significant impact on the practice or understanding of the field of education. Gardner’s award will be used to help fund a new research project, “Liberal Arts and Sciences in the 21st Century,” which will explore a diverse group of campuses around the United States that value liberal arts but differ in selectivity and demography, as well as in kinds of curricular and co-curricular offerings.
• Professor Howard Gardner was awarded a Mind/Brain/Behavior Faculty Award for his project “Caregiving and the Core Functions of Music” along with Elizabeth Spelke, professor of psychology at Harvard, which is being carried out by Gardner’s advisee, doctoral candidate Sam Mehr, Ed.M.’14.
• Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’05, was awarded the 2015 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Award, a FABBS Early Career Impact Award, which recognizes early career scientists of FABBS member societies who have made major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain and behavior. Her research focuses on the neural, psychophysiological, and psychological bases of social emotion, self-awareness, and culture and their implications for children’s development and successful learning in school.
• Keith C. Catone, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’14, received one of two 2015 Division K Outstanding Dissertation awards from AERA for his dissertation, The Pedagogy of Teacher Activism: Four Portraits of Becoming and Being Teacher Activists.
• Zeke Phillips, Ed.M.’06, was awarded the Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice for his work at the Excel Academy–Chelsea, in Massachusetts, which is one of two schools he helped found. He will start as a ninth-grade English teacher at Excel Academy Charter High School when it opens in the fall.
• Doctoral candidate Silvia Diazgranados Ferráns, Ed.M.’12, received an Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellowship in Ethics. Ferráns is also a New Civics Spencer Scholar at HGSE, and is the founder of Juegos de Paz, an education for peace program in Colombia.
• Doctoral candidate Celia Gomez, Ed.D.’13, received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. She was a 2014–2015 Julius B. Richmond Fellow, and has focused much of her research on human development, early childhood care and education, and the general well-being of families with young children, with a focus on children and families from low-income, minority, and under-served populations.
• Daphne Penn and Carolina Valdivia Ordorica, Ph.D. candidates in Culture, Institutions, and Societies, each received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.
• Doctoral candidate Samuel Ronfard, Ed.M.’11, received a fellowship from the Harvard University–China Scholarship Council Exchange. For the past two years, he has conducted research at the Living Laboratory at the Boston Museum of Science. His research focuses on social and cognitive development in childhood, and how they acquire and relay knowledge from others.
• Doctoral candidate Matthew Shaw, Ed.M.’14, the Spencer Foundation Early Career Scholar in New Civics, received the Law and Social Science Dissertation Fellowship from the American Bar Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Shaw’s research focuses on the constitutionally permissible ways that both federal and state governments can reduce educational inequity.
• Doctoral candidate George Spencer, Ed.M.’08, received an American Education Research Association Minority (AERA) Dissertation Fellowship.
• Irving Pressley McPhail, M.A.T.’71, now the sixth president and chief executive officer of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering Inc., was the 2015 commencement speaker for the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas.
• Deborah Bial, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’04, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, was the featured speaker at Colby College’s baccalaureate.

If you are a member of the HGSE community and recently have won an award or achieved a special honor, please email marin_jorgensen@gse.harvard.edu.