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The Office of Research and Engagement (ORE) and Office of Faculty Development (OFD) have announced the recipients of the 2025 Distinguished Community Engagement Awards for Research, Teaching, and Service.

The annual awards recognize individuals within the campus community – as well as community partner organizations – for their outstanding contributions to community-engaged research, teaching and service with impacts at the local, regional, national or international level.

The award is supported by ORE, OFD and the Office of the Provost. More information on the awards and former recipients can be found here.

Winners - 2025 Distinguished Community Engagement Awards for Research, Teaching, and Service

Laura Ciolkowski – Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Service

Ciolkowski is a senior lecturer and associate director of the graduate program in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. She has been recognized for her research, teaching, and service, and over the past several years has developed the UMass Amherst Jail Education Initiative (JEI). The JEI brings faculty into various houses of correction around the state, offering college courses to individuals who are currently incarcerated. In addition to managing the bureaucratic and planning needs to coordinate classes in jails or prisons, she has also recruited other members of the UMass faculty to participate as teachers in the JEI.

Sandy Litchfield – Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Research

Litchfield, an associate professor in the Department of Architecture, has a creative practice in gallery art, public art and special installations, and her recent pieces have been commissioned by museums throughout the region and in New York City. Litchfield’s work is grounded in research in cartography and the intersection of landscape and urban planning. Her work is often inspired by historical maps and overlaid with contemporary social and environmental issues. In addition, she has experience curating projects at the intersection of art and architecture – a recent project, “Y3K: On Distant Keys and The Futuring Lab,” addressed the threats of climate change and invited artists, scientists, activists and others to participate in the creative process over five days of events.

Susan Shaw – Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Research

Shaw is a professor of health promotion and policy. Through the Center for Community Health Equity Research (CCHER), she has not only engaged in community-engaged research herself, she has also built capacity across the university for equitable community-engaged research done by other faculty. CCHER has developed a set of best practices to guide community-engaged research at UMass Amherst, and her work has looked to the future of public health, building future generations of public health scholars who are engaging in community-engaged research. Shaw has a current grant focused on vulnerable populations in the region, and she has a longstanding research relationship of two decades with Caring Health Center (CHC) in Springfield.

Charles (Chip) Weems – Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching

Weems, a professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, has a record of over 24 years of community-engaged teaching, impacting local, national and international communities. His efforts grew out of a desire to broaden participation in computer science. Locally, Weems developed a computer science curriculum at the Hartsbrook Waldorf High School in Hadley that has been adopted by other Waldorf organizations worldwide. Additionally, by driving changes in the Advanced Placement Computer Science curriculum, he has impacted high school and college computer science education nationally and internationally. These contributions have been recognized at UMass and by major professional societies in the field of computer science.

Baystate Medical Center Department of Nursing Research – Community Partner Award

Baystate Medical Center Department of Nursing Research received this nomination from professors Karen Giuliano and Frank Sup, co-directors of the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation. Under the direction of UMass Amherst alumna Dr. Cidalia Vital, the Baystate research team has developed a deep and lasting collaborative relationship with the university. The Elaine Marieb Center has an ongoing collaboration with BMC that focuses on bridging the gap between research and patient care. In addition to the local impacts, this research collaboration has led to two recent healthcare patent applications, with a third planned for this year.