Assistant Professor Andrea Marston was awarded the 2022 Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring Award from the School of Graduate Studies. This award, issued on the basis of School-wide nominations of graduate faculty at Rutgers, is given to two professors from the University and recognizes distinguished contributions to graduate student training and mentorship. Dr. Marston received the award at the annual SGS Award Ceremony on May 12th at the Rutgers Club. The Graduate Program Director of Geography, Asher Ghertner (pictured right), introduced Dr. Marston, noting the following:
In her three years as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, Andrea Marston has fundamentally transformed teaching and mentorship in our Graduate Program. Andrea has taught five graduate seminars in three years, including our required introductory course, called Geographic Perspectives twice. She has recruited three outstanding new PhD students to our program and serves on more committees now than any other faculty. Not only are her graduate seminars carefully crafted, radically open in their design, and innovative in their content, but they are highly popular – despite huge reading demands. Her Spring 22 seminar capped out at 18 students, the biggest Geography seminar we've had in recent memory. She is clearly drawing interest from across the humanities and social sciences.
On top of this, Andrea serves on the Graduate Curriculum Committee and the Department's Anti-Racism Task Force, and she served on the Admissions committee for three years, where her contributions directly led to a more inclusive, equitable and dynamic Graduate Program. She also has helped recruit underrepresented students into our program, including as a mentor for a Rutgers RISE student last summer, who has just been awarded a SUPER-Grad Fellowship from SGS. As the organizer of our department’s biennial MaGrann Conference – a two-day conference that, under Andrea’s leadership last year, explored links between environmental justice activism and research on toxic exposure – she designed her seminar around the conference theme, inviting students to directly engage presenters’ scholarship in advance. Students then served as discussants for the conference, bringing perfectly crafted questions to a global audience of listeners. This is just one sign of how she trains students to intervene in the world in ways that foreground rigor, care and justice. She is so deserving of this award."
Congrats Professor Marston!
