Congratulations to the 11 engineering staff members who received 2010/11 Excellence Through Innovation Awards from the University of Toronto for their “above and beyond” contributions to the University and its mandate. The award recognizes the contributions of administrative staff in advancing the U of T’s strategic objectives, encouraging administrative innovation and providing a platform for sharing best practices.
Renzo Basset, Linda Espeut, Carolyn Farrell, Brenda Fung, Catherine Gagne, Karen Lewis and Lisa Camilleri, the staff members on the Faculty’s Staff Awards Committee, received a Team Award for their work creating a slate of staff recognition awards in 2009. They created and implemented four new awards — the Emerging Leader Award, Influential Leader Award, Innovation Award and Quality of Student Experience Award — and revamped the Agnes Kaneko award into the Agnes Kaneko Citizenship Award. These awards, which are entering their third year, are presented at the Faculty’s annual Celebrating Engineering Success event.
Bruno Korst, Steve Miszuk and Joe Wong were also recognized with a Team Award, for developing and implementing an online health and safety training and record-keeping system for use throughout the Faculty. The system provides user-friendly online safety tutorials which students can work through on their own time, as well as an accurate record-keeping tool for administrators. It ensures Faculty-wide consistency in core training but allows the departments the flexibility to customize course-specific training. This team won the Faculty’s Innovation Award in the spring.
Pauline Martini was also recognized as part of a team developing U of T’s new Automated Graduate Award Disbursement Processes, which will improve the way in which scholarships and awards are delivered to graduate students. The new system will integrate data derived from financial records and student databases to make the process easier to administer and more transparent for students.
“These awards acknowledge the essential role played by our outstanding staff in advancing the University’s mandate to be among the very best educational and research institutions in the world,” states Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “On behalf of the Faculty, I congratulate the awardees and thank them for their many valuable contributions.”
Excellence Through Innovation Award recipients will be recognized at a reception at the President’s Residence on September 20.
