(Above, left to right) Award winners Rachel Fink, Sean Decatur, Indira Peterson, and Penny Gill.

Faculty members gathered in newly renovated Pratt Hall Tuesday to toast the accomplishments of four of the College's finest.

Sean Decatur, newly promoted to associate professor of chemistry, and Indira Peterson, professor of Asian studies, were presented the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship. Rachel Fink, associate professor of biological sciences, and Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and professor of politics, were presented the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Each received a citation and a check for $2,500. The awards were given for the first time last year.

Added at the last moment was a fifth, impromptu prize. Joseph Ellis, Ford Foundation Professor of History who last week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, left McCulloch Auditorium with a sizable bottle of champagne in the crook of his arm.

President Joanne Creighton, who presided over the ceremonies, congratulated the Faculty Awards Committee—O'Shea and retired faculty members Eugenia Herbert, Robert Herbert, Sally Montgomery, and Marilyn Pryor—for accomplishing the difficult task of choosing only four faculty members for honors. "There are many faculty who are deserving of this award," Creighton said.

O'Shea introduced the winners, reading aloud the citations prepared for each by the Faculty Awards Committee. Rachel Fink, he said, "is committed to teaching because she loves science and wants all her students to be engaged not only by it, by also by the way scientists think and how they acquire knowledge. She has argued that ‘the time spent with our students in laboratories teaching them how to answer scientific questions … is the core of what we do.' "

Accepting her award, Fink credited her father, a research physician, and mother, a teacher, for her deciding "in utero" to make her career in teaching. She became hooked on the field of developmental biology in the summer of 1977, "playing nursemaid" to embryonic sea creatures as part of a research project. Because "what I see through the microscope needs to be shared," she presented slides of tiny marine life, glowing like neon under polarized light.

O'Shea introduced Decatur as the epitome of "the research scholar, who makes significant contributions to his profession, the teacher, whose love of subject translates into excitement and energy in the classroom, and the community member who cares deeply about his community and acts with conviction to further its integrity."

Decatur said a main goal of his work is "demonstrating that there is space for creating a research program that asks important questions, but also serves as a valuable teaching tool." Being able to work collaboratively with his students "is what I really love about this enterprise," he said.

Gill has an "extraordinary gift of listening, probing, (and) provoking," O'Shea said. "Clearly students feel they are learning with Penny, not from Penny. What happens in a course that transforms students' ways of looking at their own lives and at the world around them? Over and over they comment on finding their own voices in her classes … but this is just the beginning."
Teaching, Gill said, "is about a conversation with friends," an engagement around such questions as "What is it to be a living human being?” and "How does the world really work?" Helping each student discover the connections between the events in her life and the main ideas in the course material, she said, is a key to helping her become a critical thinker and "a presence in the world."

O'Shea introduced Peterson as "the scholarly equivalent of the winner of the Olympic pentathlon. She excels in not five but six domains of South Indian culture: history, music, dance, folklore, religion, and literature."

Peterson described a recent research project in which she learned how South Indians of the nineteenth century modified a traditional drama to "reimagine the world” in light of European scientific discoveries of the time. "Scholarship makes of us adventurers, explorers, detectives, and gives us, I would like to think, exciting stories to tell," she said.
The recipients' citations will be published in the next issue of the College Street Journal.