Faculty Awards for 2012

LPS Distinguished Teaching Award

Yvette Bordeaux. Ph.D.

This award honors a member of Penn’s affiliated faculty for distinguished teaching in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies. 

Yvette Bordeaux was named Director of the Professional Master’s Programs in Earth and Environmental Science in 2007. A graduate of the University of Rochester, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. She has taught paleontology, environmental analysis, and courses on climate change.

Praise from her students and colleagues also won Dr. Bordeaux a Provost’s Award for exceptional teaching in 2001. Students spoke of her lively and thought-provoking lectures and her ability to make clear connections between the concepts covered in class and the real repercussions on the environment. Her colleagues were equally enthusiastic. One commented: "Dr. Bordeaux represents all that is golden in the art and science of pedagogy."

2012 LPS Award of Distinction

Alice Kelley, Ph.D.

This award honors extraordinary devotion to the principles of academic excellence, exemplary service, and innovation.

Alice Kelley earned her Bachelor’s degree from Smith College and her Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York before beginning her Penn career as a lecturer in the English department. Within five years, after the publication of her first book on Virginia Woolf, she had moved from Lecturer to Assistant Professor to Associate Professor. She also assumed the role of Undergraduate Chair, where she had the pleasure of working as advisor to many English majors, running the junior faculty job search, adopting the then-CGS Humanities majors, and pursuing a Master’s in Counseling from Penn’s Graduate School of Education.

After a decade as Undergraduate Chair, she returned to teaching and also served in the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life as liaison to faculty who were encountering students with severe personal and academic troubles. During that period, she served one day a week in the College Office doing general advising, and soon realized that in individual work with students she had found her calling and that both her faculty experience and her training as a therapist could enrich her advising. As Assistant Dean, she worked for fifteen years with advisees from the College and from the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, delighting in the variety of questions, problems, triumphs, and complications that her students brought to her.

One of the achievements of which she is most proud is the establishment of the Course Problem Notice system, which she instituted in the English Department when she was Undergraduate Chair and saw through committees who could translate what she had done with paper class lists into a useable computerized system; for finding ways to lead students away from disaster and toward exciting academic and personal fulfillment was her always goal as an advisor.