Entomology professor, Department of Chemistry receive Violet Haas Awards

Two recipients were selected to receive the Violet Haas Award for 2016 and were honored at a reception on Thursday (Dec. 1) in the Purdue Memorial Union's Anniversary Drawing Room. Linda Mason, professor of entomology, received an individual award, and the Department of Chemistry received a departmental award. The awards were presented by Patrice Buzzanell, director of the Butler Center and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair for Leadership Excellence.

In addition, the second annual Violet Haas Fellowship was awarded by the colleges of Science and Engineering to Robin Tanamachi, assistant professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences.

The Violet Haas Award "recognizes those individuals, programs or departments at Purdue who have effectively facilitated the advancement of women in hiring, promotion, education and salary, or have generally enhanced a positive professional climate for women at Purdue University," according to the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence, which administers the award. This is the 25th annual Violet Haas Award.

Mason has been at Purdue since 1991 and joined the Graduate School as an associate dean in 2010. She has co-chaired the Women Faculty in Agriculture group, served on the provost's child care task force and has been key to Purdue's ADVANCE program and the Conference for Pre-Tenure Women. Nominators wrote that she has demonstrated her commitment to moving women in the STEM fields forward and has served as a positive mentor for women graduate students. Mason's efforts extend to women in many different areas at Purdue and beyond.

The second award was presented to the Department of Chemistry and was accepted by Timothy Zwier, department head and the M. G. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 1975, there was not a single woman serving as a tenure-track professor in the Department of Chemistry. Today, there are 14 women professors. The award citation states that the department has been recognized by the American Chemical Society during recent years as top two in percentage of tenure-track women faculty. The department gives credit to the leadership of its women faculty and women in key positions across campus. The department has worked toward dual career hiring and retention. It is the conscious effort to practice diversity and inclusion in all efforts and to be inspired by past and future women in science that prompted both the nomination and the award.

The Violet B. Haas Fellowship, for which Tanamachi was selected in its second award, is to assist pre-tenure faculty women who have children and who are in the College of Science or College of Engineering.

Buzzanell said, "I consider giving the Violet Haas Award to be one of the highlights of our fall programming. This award means so much to the women and men at Purdue -- the nominees and winners have been tireless advocates for change that benefits women, men, and Purdue as a whole. We are honored to celebrate their accomplishments and the vision of what an inclusionary culture can mean and look like at Purdue."

More about the Violet Haas Award can be found here.

For more information, contact Buzzanell at buzzanel@purdue.edu.

Writer: Kelsey Schnieders, kschnied@purdue.edu

Source: Patrice M. Buzzanell, buzzanel@purdue.edu