From harvesting oranges grown on campus, to spreading the importance of sleep in two languages, to creating engineering excellence half a world away, Arizona State University faculty and staff are helping to change the world for the better.
Those efforts and others were honored at the April 14 President’s Recognition Reception, where ASU President Michael M. Crow awarded university movers and shakers with the President’s Award for Innovation, the President’s Award for Sustainability and the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness, as well as the SUN Awards for Individual Excellence.
Speaking at the reception, President Crow cited three key things the efforts of ASU faculty and staff are accomplishing: inspiring people through innovation, using those innovations to achieve university goals and demonstrating the model of enterprise.
“We have to move forward, adjust, be creative, leverage. All the things that you all do are a part of all that,” Crow told the crowd at the reception. “We are trying to inspire the rest of the institution and we are trying to inspire the rest of the community to be creative, to be adaptive, to move forward.”
The President’s Award for Innovation provides formal recognition to ASU faculty and staff who have worked as teams that have made significant contributions to ASU and higher education through the creation, development and implementation of innovative projects, programs, initiatives, services and techniques.
President's Award for Innovation
Vietnam is home to the Intel Corporation’s largest test and assembly site in the world. To a company that is the world’s foremost producer of devices that make computers possible, having a staff of expertly trained engineers is essential.
In 2010, Intel approached ASU to pursue a USAID Global Development Alliance grant, which would bring co-investment from a consortium of higher-education, industry and government partners, allowing Vietnamese engineering faculty to train at ASU as well as participate in ASU-led, in-country workshops.
One of this year’s recipients of the President’s Award for Innovation, the Higher Engineering Education Alliance Program (HEEAP) is giving Vietnamese engineering faculty the knowledge and skills to graduate work-ready students who possess the applied and technical communication skills required by multinational corporations.
“It is gratifying six years into this project to see the transformation in the classroom by the faculty bringing a lot of the active-based, applied project and team-based learning approaches to their instruction,” said Jeffrey Goss, project director for HEEAP, executive director for the Office of Global Outreach and Extended Education and assistant dean in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.