As part of the UW Awards of Excellence Ceremony in June of 2023, UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Mark Richards awarded the inaugural UW Excellence in Global Engagement Award to Dr. Faisal Hossain, John R. Kiely Endowed Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering.
The Excellence in Global Engagement Award honors faculty and staff at the UW for their leadership in global engagement, focusing on teaching, research, and service activities that connect UW students, faculty, and staff to global communities locally, nationally, and internationally. The Award alternates each year between faculty and staff honorees.
Dr. Faisal Hossain was selected from a cohort of nine distinguished UW faculty. The Office of Global Affairs is excited to celebrate Dr. Hossain alongside the other eight nominees, and we invite you to learn more about their global impact below.
Introducing the 2022-2023 Excellence in Global Engagement Award Nominees
Faisal Hossain
Dr. Faisal Hossain has deployed engineering technologies to reduce social inequity in the availability of food, water and energy around the world. Beyond his research impact, Hossain is dedicated to training the next generation of scholars in water management and forecasting systems. As a teacher, Faisal has personally trained 10 graduate students and 300 other trainees globally and manages the SASWE (sustainability, satellites, water, and environment) research group at the university. Prof. Hossain has received a number of awards including the Charles Falkenberg Award and the International Award (2020) from the American Geophysical Union. In 2022, Dr. Hossain was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is a two-time recipient of the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund Grant.
S. Charusheela
Over the past three years Dr. Charu has made significant contributions to institutionalizing internationalization efforts on the Bothell and Tacoma campuses. She has served as the faculty advisor to Global Initiatives at UW Bothell from 2019 to 2022 and during that time started the Global Initiatives Advisory Board. Charu was part of the first cohort of COIL fellows and has since introduced new processes that make COIL more sustainable as a curricular offering. A former international student herself, Charu helped to advocate on behalf of a new international student fee structure at UW Tacoma. Charu’s own scholarship focuses on issues of gender, globalization, postcoloniality and decoloniality. She has twice served as an elected member of the board for the International Association for Feminist economics, and is currently focused on projects for local and global change through research on and support for socially just and ecologically sensitive approaches to solidarity economies.
Listen: Dr. Charu on the Diverse Economies podcast.
Heidi Gough
Through her research, teaching, and service, Dr. Heidi Gough has forged pathways to improve global gender equity in the water sciences, particularly in regions where women engineers and scholars are often marginalized. Her research has included wastewater treatment practices in Syrian refugee camps, in agricultural communities in the Eastern Nile Delta and along the Mt. Everest summit trail in Nepal. She has provided guest lectures for classes in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. In 2012, she established the first engineering-themed faculty-led study abroad course at the university, leading students to learn about water engineering practices in the water-scarce country of Jordan. Dr. Gough is a co-founder of the Women Water Nexus (WWN), a technical committee within the International Council of the Environment and Water Resources Institute that facilitates international engagement for Water Engineering Professionals. She is a recipient of the Outstanding Teaching award at UW for her study abroad efforts and a three-time recipient of the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund Grant.
Mary Kay Gugerty
Dr. May Kay Gugerty is Professor of Nonprofit Management & Philanthropy, the Associate Dean for Teaching & Learning, and the Principal Investigator for the International Program on Public Health Leadership (IPPHL) at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. IPPHL works with emerging African public health leaders and as of 2023 comprises a community of over 150 African leaders across 24 countries. Her research has included work on NGO and nonprofit evaluation and accountability, the impact of community self-help groups on women’s social and economic well-being and the impacts of donor funding on local organizations. During her time at UW, Dr. Gugerty has published one book, two edited volumes, and more than two dozen peer-reviewed articles. She actively engages doctoral students, having co-authored extensively with PhD students and serving on more than 30 dissertation committees.
Divya McMillin
Dr. Divya McMillin is Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Global Engagement and Professor of Global Media Studies at UW Tacoma. She is a leading scholar of participatory design and global media studies with three critically acclaimed books and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the impact of globalization in emerging economies. Her fieldwork in sweatshops and call centers have merited her Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association, marking her as a postcolonial scholar who has shaped the field of International Cultural Studies. At UW Tacoma, Dr. McMillin is known as the Builder, having pioneered the Communication major, served as founding Executive Director of the Global Honors Program, and created the Institute for Innovation and Global Engagement and the Global Innovation and Design (GID) Lab, while forging international partnerships and collaborations to enrich curricular offerings. The GID Lab provides community design thinking workshops connecting students to project based learning. All programs demonstrate Dr. McMillin’s commitment to experiential learning, integrating curricular pathways with community engagement. In addition to courses in Global Media Studies at UW Tacoma, Dr. McMillin is guest lecturer in the London School of Economics Executive Msc in Cities Program. She is the only faculty at UW Tacoma to receive all three honors in research, teaching, and community engagement with a Distinguished Research Award (2012), Distinguished Teaching Award (2017), and Community Engagement Legacy Award (2021).
Stephen Meyers
Dr. Stephen Meyers is Associate Professor in Law, Societies and Justice (LSJ) and the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS) (and core faculty in Disability Studies). He is also Director of the Center for Global Studies in the JSIS. Within disability studies, Dr. Meyers is actively working to define “global disability studies” as a new subfield within both international studies and disability studies. This includes two forthcoming books, one the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Hierarchies in Disability Human Rights, which features chapters from academics, activists, and others from more than twenty countries, the majority of whom identify as persons with disabilities, and What is Global Disability Studies? a new monograph from University of California Press. In his Social Justice through Philanthropy Class, an undergraduate seminar in partnership with the Philanthropy Lab Foundation and the Seattle Intenrational Foundation, students study a key global social problem and then award grants to both grassroots associations and international development and humanitarian non-governmental organizations addressing those issues. To date, the course has granted over $300,000 to organization around the world. Finally, through the Disability and International Development Initiative (DIDI), which was founded by Dr. Meyers and Megan McCloskey, Dr. Meyers has involved over forty graduate and undergraduate students as DIDI Fellows in applied research projects, which have ranged from supporting the UN Secretariat on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to organizing focus groups with youth around the world for UNESCO’s “Every Child Should Be Welcome”: School violence and bullying involving young people with disabilities report, researching and writing case studies for the UNFPA’s activelyg Young Persons with Disabilities: Global Study on Ending Gender-based Violence and Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, and developing an amicus brief for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights..
Ana Lucia Seminario
Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario, originally from Peru, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatric Dentistry and adjunct faculty in the department of Global Health. She has taught courses, provided clinical care, and conducted research on behalf of the UW since 2007. Most notable is her work as Director of the UW Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health, which she leads since 2017 to improve quality of life by promoting collaboration and inclusivity in oral and craniofacial research. The Center focuses its efforts in Thailand, Kenya, Peru and Washington state (working with the refugee population). Notable accomplishments include: a virtual manuscript program for Kenyan oral health professionals, creating internships in global oral health, setting up the Visiting Scholar program for global oral health at the UW and increasing research capacity in the sites she works at through NIH funding. .
Toshiko Takenaka
Dr. Toshiko Takenaka is Washinton Research Foundation/W. Hunter Simpson Professor of Technology Law at the law school and a world-renowned expert in comparative patent law and intellectual property (IP) law with a global footprint. Toshiko established the globally-recognized Center for Advanced Study and Research on Innovation Policy (CASRIP), which aims to improve discussion and exchange of views among legal professionals impacting IP law and policy across the world. She is fluent in English, Japanese, and German and both teaches and conducts research in all three languages. Since Professor Takenaka started working at the UW nearly 3 decades ago, she has educated more than 500 J.D. students, many of whom practice IP law in the U.S. nationwide, and approximately 200 students and visiting scholars who serve important roles in the patent bar, government, and judiciary in Asia and Europe
Anu Taranath
Dr. Anu Taranath is Teaching Professor in CHID and English and has been at the UW for 23 years. She serves asa racial equity and DEI consultant across the UW campuses and around the country. Her research focuses on the politics and practices of diversity, social justice and global consciousness. Just some of the accolades Dr. Anu has received are: four-time member of Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Seattle Weekly’s “Best of Seattle” recognition, the UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and multiple US Fulbright Fellowships. Her 2019 book, Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, has gained widespread recognition and is the winner of multiple book awards. Dr. Anu’s impact on campus has been extensive and includes collaborations with partners in over a dozen countries and leading study abroad programs in India, Ghana and Mexico. She serves as a consultant and coach for UW international education programs as well as more widely in the travel industry, and is a founding member of the Pedagogies of Reciprocity project and Global Reciprocity Network.