This May, Trinity announced the five winners of the Distinguished Achievement Awards. These awards recognize faculty and staff who have shown outstanding dedication and accomplishments at the University. Employees have been recognized for excellence in areas including university, community, and professional service; early career teaching and scholarship; advising and mentoring; and scholarship, research, or creative work. This year’s recipients are Marc Powell, Gina Tam, Diana Young, Jonathan King, and Andrew Porter.
This May, Trinity announced the five winners of the Distinguished Achievement Awards. These awards recognize faculty and staff who have shown outstanding dedication and accomplishments at the University. Employees have been recognized for excellence in areas including university, community, and professional service; early career teaching and scholarship; advising and mentoring; and scholarship, research, or creative work. This year’s recipients are Marc Powell, Gina Tam, Diana Young, Jonathan King, and Andrew Porter.
Marc Powell, Head Athletic Trainer
Under normal circumstances, Marc Powell supervises the wellness and physical rehabilitation of more than 550 student-athletes in Trinity’s 18 intercollegiate sports. When COVID-19 hit, he became responsible for helping student-athletes, coaches, and staff safely navigate through the pandemic. Over the past two years, Powell co-authored COVID policies and procedures for Trinity Athletics and the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, managed the testing and monitoring of all student-athletes on a weekly basis, implemented the NCAA regular season and championship COVID policies, and enforced the NCAA resocialization policies. As the contact person for all COVID-related athletic issues, he was on call 24-7. One colleague writes, “It’s been a thankless, stressful, and highly demanding job…[T]here is no one at Trinity who has worked harder than Marc has this past year.
Gina Anne Tam, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History
Gina Tam is an innovative instructor whose teaching serves a number of University priorities, most notably internationalization, experiential learning, and student success. She primarily teaches classes on East Asia, with a particular focus on Chinese history, and she regularly contributes to the Being Young in Asia First-Year Experience. Tam coordinated the Trinity in Shanghai program in 2017 and has been actively involved in the East Asian Studies at Trinity program. She also co-directs the Women’s and Gender Studies interdisciplinary minor. In the area of scholarship, Tam has published an award-winning monograph, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, with Cambridge University Press. She currently holds a prestigious fellowship with the National Council on US-China Relations Public Intellectual Program.
Diana Young, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Finance and Decision Sciences
Diana Young is regarded as a highly effective educator, trusted academic adviser, and dedicated professional mentor. She is a mainstay in the Business Analytics and Technology (BAT) program, teaching three of the four required upper-division courses in the major. Young’s teaching is grounded in the use of inquiry-based, collaborative, and experiential learning. Students in BAT courses frequently find themselves challenged to apply course content to real-world scenarios, such as identifying optimal shipping strategies for Dell, Inc. in the context of the pandemic. In scholarship, she strives to address research questions that have real-world implications for information technology practitioners and practices, including topics such as gender disparity and employee turnover in the IT workforce. Young has co-authored nine peer-reviewed journal articles, and a 10th article is now working its way through the review process.
Jonathan King, Ph.D., Professor of Biology
Jonathan King was nominated by a large number of faculty colleagues, current students, and alumni, all of whom found this year’s award recipient to be a powerful, positive force in their lives. A faculty nominator noted that he “has demonstrated that it is just as possible to be an exceptional mentor-scholar as it is to be an exceptional teacher-scholar.” One Trinity alumnus, now a medical doctor, explained King’s influence by writing, “To this day, I continue to teach resident physicians and reflect the ‘no nonsense’ approach toward educating students which I learned from [my adviser] more than 20 years ago. He has certainly helped to guide me to a successful future, and he's been an exemplary role model.” King is also the new chair of Trinity’s Health Care Professions Advisory Committee.
Andrew Porter, MFA, Professor of English
Andrew Porter has published a novel and a collection of short stories during his time at Trinity, and has a second collection forthcoming this year. His first short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, received the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The novel In Between Days, was named as a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and was chosen by the San Antonio Express-News as its “Fictional Work of the Year.” Stories by Porter have been anthologized, translated, and reprinted in foreign magazines, adapted into screenplays, read on NPR’s “Selected Shorts,” and published in highly selective journals and magazines including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.