Richard Freyman Named 2026 ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentor Award Winner
The award recognizes the critically important work faculty members perform in mentoring and supporting their colleagues.
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Richard Freyman, Professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, has been named 1 of the 10 winners of the 2026 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentor Award.
The ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Awards recognize the invaluable contributions of faculty members across campus in mentoring and supporting their colleagues’ professional development. Research shows that faculty peer mentoring is key to greater inclusion and equity and UMass ADVANCE recognizes that vital work of mentoring colleagues. The awards are supported by the deans of each recipient’s school or college, with central support for this year’s inaugural award for a faculty member in a cross-campus academic unit.
The winners, selected from a competitive pool of nominees, were honored by Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, and Wilmore Webley, senior vice provost for equity and inclusion, at the 2026 ADVANCE Annual Distinguished Lecture and Awards Luncheon held on April 17.
From across career stages, six colleagues wrote of Professor Freyman’s “transformative effect on faculty advancement, helping to reduce structural inequities—particularly for women— by ensuring access to high-quality guidance, advocacy, and opportunity.” For more than 30 years, he has practiced many forms of mentorship, from help with starting research programs, to guidance on authoring manuscripts, to peer mentoring in grant-writing. His colleagues spoke to the “sustained, voluntary, and transformative nature of Dr. Freyman’s peer mentoring contributions,” and described him as consistently the first to offer support. They went on to say, “None of us started in this department thinking that we would one day lead it. But we all started in this department with Dr. Freyman thinking we would one day lead it. And to that end, he cultivated us as his successors: we go to work every day not only hoping to do good science, but hoping to support our students and our more junior colleagues in their career goals.”
Read more about this year's ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Award recipients.
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Richard Freyman
