2017 Award Winners
Dr. Beverly Brown Award
Kristin Johnson is a DrPH Candidate at the School of Public Health. Her dissertation research focuses on factors that influence modern contraception use and consequences of unintended pregnancy among adolescent girls in Bangladesh. Johnson earned a MPH in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health in 2006. She works as an evaluator at John Snow Inc., a public health consulting organization.
Boston University Women’s Guild Awards
Audrey Holm is a first-year doctoral student in organizational behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Prior to her doctoral studies, she received an MBA from Essec Business School in Paris and worked in public service organizations for eight years. Her research interests include identity, meaning at work and social relationships in and out of work, which she explores using mainly ethnographic methods. She hopes to contribute to a better understanding of today’s ever-changing workplaces.
Giselle Kennedy Lord is an MLA candidate in the Gastronomy Program at the BU MET College. She is a small business owner and aims to leverage the potential of food culture and commensality for education, community building, and social good in her work. Her academic work is focused on how diaspora communities express identity and construct a sense of home through food and cooking, with a particular interest in the Lebanese diaspora in South America. Giselle will begin her thesis research in the Fall of 2017.
Leah Reed (SSW) is a graduate of Salem State University. She works as a Service Coordinator for MA Health and Human Services, Department of Developmental Services, with individuals with intellectual disabilities. She has been working in the human services field for over 17 years. Volunteering, supporting and enriching her community, advocating, and uplifting young women are important to her. She is the vice president of the NAACP Berkshire County Branch, and a member of the Women of Color Giving Circle. She is the proud mother of two.
The Dr. Beverly Brown Award and the Boston University Women’s Guild Awards are made possible by annual donations and gifts made by members and friends of the BUWG.
Katherine Connor McLaughlin Awards
Ashley Theuring is a doctoral candidate in the practical theology program at the Boston University School of Theology, and serves as a visiting professor at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She worked a number of years at a rape, crisis, and abuse center, Women Helping Women of Hamilton County, as an advocate and educator. Her dissertation research focuses on practices and the role of hope in healing after experiences of domestic violence. She intends to use her award to travel to House of Peace, a domestic violence shelter in Chicago that supports a Latina community, to conduct research for her dissertation.
Carol Ferrara is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the sociocultural anthropology program at BU. Her dissertation provides a comparative ethnographic analysis of how pious Muslims and Catholics interpret and frame questions of morality, identity, and public ethics in pluralistic, secular France.
Fulya Ekiz Kanik is a second-year PhD student in electrical engineering working on development of interferometric biosensors as sensitive, rapid diagnostic tools for the detection of various diseases under the supervision of Prof. Selim Ünlü. She received a BSc and a MSc in Chemistry and Biotechnology, respectively, from Middle East Technical University in Turkey and a MSc in Biomedical Engineering from UMass Lowell. She was awarded the Distinguished Electrical and Computer Engineering Fellowship at Boston University in 2015-2016, and First Place Best Poster Award at the 2014 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting. She has published 22 papers, received more than 360 citations, 2 book chapters, and presented more than 20 technical talks.
Jessica DeMarinis, MS, OTR/L, is pursuing a post-professional doctorate in occupational therapy. Her doctoral project seeks to improve health care transitions for young adults with disabilities. She received her master of science in occupational therapy from Boston University in 2017 and her bachelor of science in human development from Cornell University in 2008. Jessica is also a staff inpatient OT at Massachusetts General Hospital. She sincerely thanks the BU Women’s Guild and her Sargent College professors for their support.
Katherine Connor McLaughlin was an early and active member of the Women’s Guild. Her husband, Jim, who endowed this award, was a doctor at the BU Student Health Clinic, where he was respected by his colleagues as a diagnostician and beloved by students as a reassuring presence (he had, for their amusement, a large collection of distinctively flamboyant neckties).
Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award
Lisa Taddeo-Waite is a 2017 recipient of The Pushcart Prize and a Saul Bellow Fellow in fiction at Boston University. Her fiction has been published in The New England Review, The Sun Magazine and Esquire, among others. Her nonfiction has been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Political Writing and published in Esquire, New York Magazine, Elle Magazine, The New York Observer, Glamour Magazine and The Sun Magazine. She is working on her debut nonfiction for Simon & Schuster, and her first novel.
Florence Engel Randall was the author of six novels and more than 100 short stories published in literary and popular periodicals. She took great interest in the careers of young writers. The Randall award was endowed by the late Ruth Levine, a member of the faculty of the School of Medicine and a Guild member.