Nominations now accepted for President’s Staff Innovation Award

Nominations for the President’s Staff Innovation Award are being accepted now through Feb. 28.

In its fifth year, the President’s Staff Innovation Award recognizes individual staff members or teams whose big ideas and “outside The Cube” thinking help make the university a better, more inclusive community.

Two prizes are available — honoring one individual staff member and one team. The chosen individual will receive a $2,000 award, while the chosen team will share a $3,000 prize.

Faculty and staff members are encouraged to nominate individuals or teams whose innovative ideas and solutions meet the award criteria. Qualifying innovations may be a process, product, method, system, program or service.

Nominations should represent an improvement or increase in:

• Efficiency

• Productivity

• Cost savings

• Achievement of environmental or health and well-being goals

• Enhancement of the diverse culture and inclusive climate of the university.

Last year’s individual award recipient was Tina Matter, senior web designer and administrator in the College of Pharmacy for developing a web-based tool used by the dean, administration, faculty and staff to assess faculty performance.

The team award was presented to Valerie Johnson, Wendy Palms and Amanda Kanter for making the MCubed concept for distributing seed funding to support multidisciplinary faculty research and scholarship more responsive and inclusive.

For more information about the award, or to submit a nomination, visit the award website.