In the coming days, DEOs, departmental administrators, and faculty members will receive a call to inform the Dean’s Office of honors and awards that have been received by College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty during 2020-2021. While we are aware of the majority of them, each year we learn of new ones during this process that deserve recognition by the college. Please work with your faculty to ensure that we have the information needed to celebrate and honor their accomplishments.

The professional honors and awards that our faculty receive each year from the Board of Regents; University of Iowa; CLAS; other UI units such as Honors at Iowa and OVPR; and academic organizations are important and well deserved.

Each spring semester, CLAS enjoys celebrating those professional accomplishments at the Faculty Honors Celebration. In 2020, however, due to the campus COVID-19 shutdown and the resulting stress on everyone in the community, we did not hold the Faculty Honors Celebration, and faculty honors were not properly recognized.

We are still not able to gather in person this spring, and we know that virtual Zoom events are a poor substitute for events like these. Accordingly, we plan to honor the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 faculty recipients of professional honors and awards in another way.

In April, we will unveil a new CLAS Faculty Honors website. This site will recognize and celebrate our faculty members’ accomplishments, sharing the news and telling the stories of the work that led to the recipients’ recognition.

Please help us recognize your faculty members’ outstanding work by informing us of the honors they have received. Thank you.