Lee Phillip

Distinguished Alumnae Award Recipient, 1976

Lois Wille

Distinguished Alumnae Award Recipient, 1986

Medill BSJ 1953; MSJ 1954

 Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago journalist Wille launched her journalism career in 1957 at the Chicago Daily News, where she focused on urban issues and state and local politics. She was awarded the first of two Pulitzer Prizes in 1963 for Public Service for a series of critical stories that called attention to the issue of providing birth control services in the public health programs in its area. She won her second Pulitzer in 1989 for editorials on local issues while she was an associate editorial page editor at the Chicago Tribune. Her articles led to important changes in health care, housing, the juvenile court system and numerous other antiquated and corrupt institutions in Chicago. After 18 years as a Daily News reporter, she became the paper’s national correspondent. Prior to joining the Chicago Tribune, she was the editorial page editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and spent one year in the same position at the Chicago Daily News. She retired in 1991 as the Chicago Tribune’s editorial page editor. Wille was a member of the inaugural class of the Medill Hall of Achievement in 1997.

Nan Robertson

Distinguished Alumnae Award Recipient, 1991

Medill BSJ 1948

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robertson was a cultural reporter for The New York Times for more than 30 years. She won a 1983 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her harrowing account of an attack of toxic shock syndrome that nearly took her life, which appeared as a cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The New York Times hired her to write about fashion and women’s news in London. In 1955 she moved to New York to cover women’s news for The Times. From 1963 to 1971, she was a Times Washington correspondent, covering the White House, Congress, presidential campaigns, voting and more. From 1972 to 1975 Robertson was based in Paris, covering France and neighboring countries and the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus. From 1975 to 1982, she reported for the Living and Style Sections. She was a member of the inaugural class of the Medill Hall of Achievement in 1977. Her 1992 book, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and The New York Times,” focused on her fight for workplace parity by female employees of The Times.”

Founding Members of The Alumnae of NU Continuing Education Program

Distinguished Alumnae Award Recipient, 1998

Nancy Dussault

Distinguished Alumnae Award Recipient, 1990

The Alumnae Award recognizes a woman who has brought honor to Northwestern University through outstanding professional contributions in her field and who has attained national recognition. Established in 1976, the Alumnae Award has been presented every year to an alumna who has had a significant impact in her field of endeavor. Educators, journalists, doctors, scientists, and artists are included among The Alumnae’s roster of awardees.

Bienen School Music ’57 BS

Award-winning Actress Dussault made her Broadway debut in 1960 in the hit musical, “Do Re Mi,” receiving a Tony nomination for Best Supporting or Featured Actress in a Musical in 1961. In 1964 and 1965, she appeared in the Broadway hit “Bajour,” receiving her second Tony nomination in 1965 for Best Female Musical Lead. Many other stage productions followed, including “Carousel,” “Peter Pan,” “Finian’s Rainbow,” “Fiorello!.” “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” “South Pacific,” and “Into The Woods.” She also was one of the first hosts of ABC-TV’s “Good America,” appearing alongside David Hartman at its premier on November 3, 1975. She returned to the stage in 1977 to star in the Sondheim musical, “Side by Side.” From 1980 to 1983 Dussault portrayed Ted Knight’s wife in the TV comedy “Too Close for Comfort in 1980. The show won a People’s Choice Award for Best New Television Comedy in 1981. She won an Emmy Award for “Cabaret Tonight,” a PBS special, and has appeared in TV specials and as a guest on TV talk shows. She started teaching musical theater at UCLA when she moved to Los Angeles to continue her theater career. In 1989 she released her first CD, “Heart and Soul,” a collection of cabaret songs.

Amanda Stathopoulos

Curriculum Innovation Award Recipient, 2017

Awardee Amanda Stathopoulos is the William A. Patterson Junior Chair of Transportation and an assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department in the McCormick School of Engineering. She works at the intersection of science and humanities and is a teaching fellow in Northwestern’s Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching. Her course will focus on connecting students’ understanding of civil engineering with knowledge of current societal challenges. They will learn to identify problems in urban environments and customize engineering solutions for individual communities and cultures.

Engineering Possibilities: Decision Science in the Age of Smart Technologies

In her course, Amanda Stathopoulos invites civil and environmental engineering freshmen to develop a holistic understanding of potential options and outcomes of interventions in urban systems, specifically those in response to environmental, energy, health and mobility challenges. The goal of the course is to “prepare students to address the complexity of problems and engineering solutions with pervasive (and conflicting) impacts.”

The course will give students multiple perspectives on global problems while helping them understand how local conditions contribute to the success or failure of real-life engineering projects. Through a mixture of lectures, discussions with industry professionals and experts, in-class exercises and teamwork, students will be able to identify urban challenges, research and apply analysis tools and find relevant data and metrics to rank possible solutions with an understanding of implications and trade-offs.

“There is ample evidence that young engineers are eager for space and tools to reflect on the social impact of their work,” Stathopoulos notes.

Through teaching students how to evaluate technological, economic and policy implementations as well as the benefits, costs and trade-offs of competing solutions, Stathopoulos says she hopes this course will provide these opportunities for students in the beginning of their engineering courses, helping to increase critical thinking and engagement throughout their education.

The above is an excerpt from: Faculty given support to create innovative curriculum, Northwestern News, December 20, 2016 | By Kayla Stoner

The name of this award was changed in 2019 from Curriculum Development Award to Curriculum Innovation Award.