The awards celebrate excellence in the College community by honoring outstanding graduates of the College, current undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, as well as our friends and supporters.

We present three categories of awards: the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Legacy Awards; the Distinguished Alumni Awards, recognizing graduates from each of our six schools; and the Dean’s Appreciation Awards, which recognize special friends and supporters of the College.  

Col. Stephen C. Hall (Industrial Management 1967) and Pamela Hall will jointly receive the Dean’s Appreciation Award in honor of their longtime commitment to helping young people and Georgia Tech students through philanthropy, mentoring, and teaching.

The additional award winners are as follows:

Ivan Allen Jr. Legacy Awards

Bettina Cothran, a professor of German in the School of Modern Languages, developed and directed the nationally recognized immersion study abroad program Languages for Business and Technology for German.

Mariam Asad, a doctoral student in the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, explores how technology design can offer opportunities for civic participation through both policy and grassroots initiatives.

Mahdi Al-Husseini, an undergraduate double major in Public Policy and Biomedical Engineering, is a community leader in his hometown of Douglasville, Georgia, where he has organized the TEDxDouglasville talks, written a weekly column for The Douglas County Sentinel, and founded both The People’s Flag of Douglasville and the Douglas County Youth Department.

Distinguished Alumni Awards

Rawi Abdelal (B.S. Economics 1993) is the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management at Harvard Business School and the director of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Austin Dickson (M.S. Public Policy 2010) is the executive director of Literacy Action, a nonprofit organization that provides educational services to advance adults toward employment, citizenship, living wages, and post-secondary education.

Jeremy Farris (B.S. International Affairs 2004) serves as a clerk to the Honorable James O. Browning, U.S. District Judge for the District of New Mexico.

Parker Kemp (B.S. Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies/Mechanical Engineering 2014) works for Mercedes-Benz as a Sales Program Development Specialist.

Gwen Ottinger (B.S. Science, Technology, and Culture/Aerospace Engineering 1997) is an associate professor at Drexel University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society and Department of Politics.

Laurence Ralph (B.S. History, Technology, and Society 2004) is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Learn more about the 2017 Distinguished Alumni Awards here: http://www.iac.gatech.edu/community/distinguishedalumniawards