Wang Family Excellence Awards honor exceptional contributions in teaching, scholarship and service to CSU students.
The California State University (CSU) will present four faculty and one staff member with the esteemed Wang Family Excellence Award for their unwavering commitment to student achievement and advancing the CSU mission through excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Each honoree will receive an award provided by CSU Trustee Emeritus Stanley T. Wang and administered through the CSU Foundation.
Honorees will be recognized publicly today, January 30, during the CSU Board of Trustees meeting in Long Beach, California.
“It is my great honor to confer the 2024 Wang Family Excellence Award to five extraordinary individuals who have made it their life’s work to elevate the CSU learning experience and create limitless opportunities for our students,” said CSU Chancellor Mildred García. “Their skill, innovation and unwavering commitment to fulfilling the CSU’s mission wonderfully represent the highest ideals of the university.”
Introduced in 1998, the Wang Family Excellence Awards recognize CSU faculty members who have distinguished themselves through high-quality teaching and excellence in their area of expertise. The awards also acknowledge a staff member whose contributions go above and beyond expectations.
The five honorees are:
John Crockett, Ph.D., San Diego State (AVP for Research Advancement, Adjunct Professor of Geosciences) | Outstanding Staff Performance
Dr. John Crockett has been credited for invigorating the university’s research enterprise by determining what objectively measurable, functional contributions he and his team can make that leverage SDSU scholars’ intrinsic excellence. As a result, SDSU has been able to grow its research activity by more than 40% in just five years, now exceeding $192 million in external research activity in 2023.
With his team, Crockett has supported the training of more than 300 new faculty members on the San Diego State campus and many more graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. One of his group’s signature programs is the Grants Research and Enterprise Writing fellowship, which coaches early-career faculty members on communicating effectively with grant officers, developing successful proposals and sharing their research with media and other stakeholders.
For the past decade, Crockett has also worked to foster the expertise of early‐career faculty at SDSU. With an emphasis on equity, he and his team received NSF funding for and designed an intervention focused on preparing early‐career scholars to contribute equitably within science teams and be credited for their contributions.
Kelly Ansley Young, Ph.D., Cal State Long Beach (Professor of Biological Sciences) | Outstanding Faculty Innovator in Student Success
For the 20 years she has been at Cal State Long Beach, Dr. Kelly Ansley Young has utilized her exemplary teaching skills, knowledge, focused scholarship and student-centered inclusive approach to create pedagogical and mentoring programs for faculty that promote student achievement.
As part of the National Institute of Health (NIH) Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) program at Cal State Long Beach, Young created two programs to train mentors of research students, her most recent program focusing on mentoring through an equity and inclusivity lens. Since summer 2022, over 600 mentors have completed the Advanced Inclusive Mentoring (AIM) program and Young has trained AIM leaders at 11 CSU campuses, with nine of these universities adopting AIM. All told, AIM mentors are projected to reach an estimated 42,000 to 140,000 students during their careers.
Young’s reproductive biology research laboratory is revered as a place where her students are not merely observers; they do their own research, present it at conferences and publish it in scholarly journals. Young successfully funded student research through three NIH grants. Overall, Young’s practices and programs have multiplied exponentially the success of CSU students.
Daniel Crocker, Ph.D., Sonoma State (Professor and Chair of Biology) | Outstanding Faculty Scholarship
Dr. Daniel Crocker is a world-renowned researcher and expert on how human-created stressors such as noise and contaminants affect the survival and reproduction of thousands of species that live in the oceans.
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