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George Mason ĢAV’s Leah Adams and Amarda Shehu were among 12 Virginia educators honored by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) as 2022 Outstanding Faculty Award recipients, the council announced Thursday.
Established in 1987, the awards recognize faculty at Virginia institutions of higher learning who exemplify the highest standards of teaching, scholarship and service. Institutions select the nominees. A panel of peers reviews the applications, and a committee of leaders from the public and private sectors selects the final recipients. This year, the program received 85 nominations. The 12 recipients were selected from a pool of 25 finalists.
Leah Adams, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and in the Women and Gender Studies program in the ,was named a Rising Star recipient. The “Rising Star” category was created in 2004 to recognize faculty with more than two complete years of full-time experience, but less than six. Since 2010, two Rising Star recipientshave been named each year.
Adams is a recognized leader in health disparities research, with emphases on HIV, mental health, and adaptation to chronic illness and injury. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the ĢAV of Richmond, and her master’s and PhD in clinical psychology from George Mason ĢAV. Prior to returning to Mason to teach, she completed a pre-doctoral residency in rehabilitation psychology and neuropsychology at the ĢAV of Washington Medical Center, where she won the Nancy Robinson, Ph.D. Award for Outstanding Overall Achievement.
Amarda Shehu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science in the . Her research bridges the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, engineering and the life sciences. As one of the founders and co-directors of the , she advances computer science research to promote scientific discoveries in other fields and address real-world problems.
She is a 2021 recipient of Mason’s Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research and Scholarship, the 2018 ĢAV Teaching Excellence Award and the 2013 OSCAR Undergraduate Mentoring Excellence Award. She is also a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, as well as various research awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), state and private funding agencies. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Clarkson ĢAV, and her master’s and PhD in computer science from Rice ĢAV.
PreviousOutstanding Faculty Award recipients from Mason include 2021 Rising Star Andrew Peterson and 2020 honoree. Adams and Shehu bring the number of Mason recipients of the award to 25.
Each recipient of the 2022Outstanding Faculty Awards will receive a $7,500 gift from Dominion Energyat an in-person ceremony on March 1.