MSU has been named to the 2009 President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, the highest federal recognition a college or university can receive for its commitment to volunteering, service-learning, and civic engagement. MSU has received the honor each year since 2006, the year the honor roll was instituted.
Davidson's Adolescent Diversion Project Receives Carter Partnership Award
The Adolescent Diversion Project (ADP), founded in 1976 by Dr. William S. Davidson II (Psychology), has received the 2010 Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Partnership Award for Campus-Community Collaboration. The award is given annually by Michigan Campus Compact to one partnership involving a Michigan college or university and a community group. Over ADP's 25-year operation more than 4,000 youth have been diverted from the local juvenile court, with dramatic reductions in repeat offenses.
Grabill Wins Outstanding Book Award for Civic Scholarship
Jeffrey T. Grabill, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Co-Director of the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center, was given the Outstanding Book Award for Civic Scholarship by Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. Grabill's book, Writing Community Change, was chosen from a competitive field of nominations by a prestigious panel of scholars.
Thorp Receives Prestigious Award for Service-Learning Contributions
Dr. Laurie Thorp, director of MSU's Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment, has been honored by Michigan Campus Compact with a Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning Award. This prestigious annual award is the highest MCC bestows. Thorp has involved MSU students in a range of environmental protection and education projects, all designed to promote and implement quality community engagement focused on sustainability and to foster an ethic of active citizenship in students.
Deafness Research and Education Work Receives 2010 Outreach Scholarship Community Partnership Award
About the Outreach Scholarship Community Partnership (OSCP) Award
The OSCP Award provides University-wide recognition of highly engaged community-based research collaborations that positively impact both the community and scholarship. Each year, one award is conferred upon an MSU researcher and her/his designated community partner. Each receives a stipend. The award corecipients (researcher and community partner) are recognized at the University's annual Awards Convocation.
Nominations may be initiated by faculty, administrators, colleagues, students, or community partners; self-nominations are also welcome. Nominations are submitted to the dean of the college or administrator of the major administrative unit (MAU) in which the nominee is appointed, and must have the endorsement of the dean or administrator. The college or MAU then forwards the nominations of eligible candidates to University Outreach and Engagement (UOE).
For more information contact UOE at (517) 353-8977, or visit engage.msu.edu/awards/cesa.
Photo of Rachel Fisher (center) with Dream-M Team members Rose Smith (left) and Clare Koenigsknecht (right).
MSU geneticist Dr. Rachel Fisher and the Deafness Research Across Mid-Michigan (Dream-M) project were named co-recipients of the 2010 Outreach Scholarship Community Partnership Award during the annual MSU Awards Convocation in February.
For the Dream-M project, Fisher and a team of MSU scientists worked with members of a mid-Michigan farmland community for more than a decade to identify critical information related to genetic hearing loss.
While collecting family histories, the research team discovered the hearing loss involved five related families in the area, where residents were predominantly descendants of German immigrants. Working closely with deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, their families, and other members of the community, they were able to identify several mutations in two genes that cause the inherited deafness. Over time the partnership was formalized to include two community advisory boards, an ethics committee, and a research advisory committee.
The success of the Dream-M project led to the development of a new initiative partnered by this community and MSU researchers, Community-based Cooperative for Studies Across Generations (CoSAGE), to discover local genetic factors that contribute to common diseases such as Alzheimer's and breast cancer and translate the information into meaningful interventions.
For more information about Dream-M, visit engagedscholar.msu.edu/enewsletter/volume2/issue1/.
