Budig, Hamilton Awarded Chancellor's Leadership Fellowships

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Michelle Budig, professor of sociology, and Claire Hamilton, associate professor of teacher education and curriculum studies, have been awarded Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowships for the 2018 calendar year, according to John McCarthy, interim provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs.

These fellowships seek to cultivate future campus leaders by offering a half-time, one-year, temporary appointment to an administrative area on campus and by providing shadowing and mentoring from the leaders of the host units. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during the fellowship year.

Budig will be working with McCarthy on faculty development, targeting the issues faced by associate professors in their progress toward promotion to full professor. Hamilton will be working with associate provost Martha Stassen in the Office of Academic Planning and Assessment on campus initiatives related to the direct assessment of student learning outcomes. In addition, Hamilton, extending her role as chair of the General Education Council, will be assisting Carol Barr, senior vice provost and dean of undergraduate education, on the implementation of the newly adopted General Education diversity requirement.

“The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship provides an opportunity for faculty to learn about academic administration from the inside out,” McCarthy says. “It is critical to the future of this institution that talented faculty members like professors Budig and Hamilton have an opportunity to participate in high-level decision-making and contribute to development and implementation of our strategic plans.”

Budig, who joined the sociology faculty as an assistant professor in 2001, studies labor market inequalities, wage penalties for paid and unpaid caregiving, work-family policy, and nonstandard employment. She is currently co-principal investigator (PI) on a grant from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation to examine the impact of motherhood on women’s earnings and variation in the motherhood penalty by ethnic and religious group membership. Budig has been PI on grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. In 2007-08, she was a Humboldt Foundation Fellow appointed to the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, to investigate cross-national differences in family policies and their relation to women’s employment outcomes. She served on the advisory board for MPIDR’s Cross-national Demographic Policy Database.

Budig’s scholarship has received numerous awards. She is a past recipient of the Reuben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations, the World Bank/Luxembourg Income Study Gender Research Award, the American Sociological Association Family Section Best Article Award, and (twice) the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Research Excellence in Families and Work. In 2016, she received the inaugural Dean’s Research Excellence Award in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS). She has provided expert testimony on the gender pay gap and the motherhood wage penalty to the U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Commission and the Massachusetts legislature. She has served on the editorial boards for a number of leading peer-reviewed journals in sociology, including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Social Problems, and Social Politics.

Budig has served in a variety of administrative roles, on and off campus. She recently completed a term as the sociology department chair. She also served as sociology’s undergraduate program director, the associate director of the Social and Demographic Research Institute, an advisory board member for ISSR, and as a member of the SBS Research Council, Faculty Senate Status of Women Council, and the SBS college personnel committee. At the national level, she has served in a number of elected positions, including as an executive board member for the Work-Family Researchers Network, member of the Committee on Committees of the American Sociological Association, a council member of the Family and Sex and Gender sections of the American Sociological Association, and chair of the Erwin O. Smigel Award committee for the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Hamilton joined the faculty in the College of Education’s department of teacher education and curriculum studies in 2005 as an associate professor. Her research and scholarship focus on teacher preparation, early literacy development and the social/emotional contexts which support early learning and development. An important aspect of Hamilton’s work is the translation and application of her research to early childhood curricular development. An early literacy program she designed and assessed with her colleagues was independently evaluated and is one of few curricular models recognized by the U.S. Institute for Educational Sciences as a literacy program effective in supporting the foundational reading skills needed by early elementary school students.

Hamilton has provided service to her department, the College of Education, the campus and the university system in a variety of roles. Within the College of Education, she has chaired the college academic matters committee and served as chair of teacher education and curriculum studies. At the campus level, she is currently chair of the General Education Council, has co-chaired the Joint Administrative Task Force on Student Learning Outcomes Assessment and the Joint Task Force on Student Success Learning Outcomes. Hamilton has also been active in the UMass pilot participation in the Value Initiative, a multi-state project coordinated by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Multi-State Collaborate to Advance Quality Student Learning. At the national level she has also participated in the AAC&U Value Initiative as a member of the faculty scoring team for quantitative reasoning. Hamilton has had an ongoing interest in innovative technology and has served the campus as a mentor in the General Education Fellows program, a participant and presenter in the Innovation Fellows program, and as a faculty representative to various committees sponsored through Information Technology.