U. staff members honored for years of service, dedication

Winners of the President’s Achievement Award and the Donald Griffin ’23 Management Award were recognized at the annual Service Recognition Luncheon on March 24.

516 members of the University staff and administration were also honored at the luncheon for their service. According to the University’s press release, the recognized staff members have dedicated a total of 9,430 years of service, from 167 employees with 10 years of service, to 7 employees with 45 years of service.

The President’s Achievement Award, established in 1997, is the highest level of recognition for employees on support and administrative staffs. The award recognizes members of staff and administration who have been on campus for five or more years for their dedication, contributions and service.

The recipients of the President’s Achievement Award were Suzanne Burchfield of the Landscape Grounds Shop, Brandon Gaines from the Office of Finance and Treasury, Peggy Henke in University Health Services, Jo Ann Kropilak-Love of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Irina Rivkin from Office of Information Technology.

Burchfield, a horticulturalist, has been serving the Landscape Grounds Shop for 16 years and is currently crew leader, managing and caring for the University’s plantings. Burchfield received a degree in horticulture from the University of Rhode Island.According to the press release, she trains a new group of student employees for horticultural work every summer, leading by example toimpart knowledge and demonstrate proper methods and techniques.

Gaines, who has served for nine years in the Office of Finance and Treasury, is currently manager of administrative services. Gaines has volunteered for multiple positions, events and offices, including the Admissions Office last spring for Princeton Preview and as secretary to the CPUC Diversity Task Force Working Group on Structure and Support.

Henke has worked for 20 years for the University and currently serves as office manager of Employee Health at University Health Services.

Kropilak-Love has served as the undergraduate administrator for the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering for over two decades.

Rivkin, who has managed the PeopleSoft platformfor Princeton over the last 10 years, is the director of enterprise resource planning for Administrative Information Services.

PeopleSoft is an administrative tool, which hosts TigerHub, and assists in maintaining student records, financials and other human resources data.

Burchfield, Rivkin and Henke declined to comment.Gaines andKropilak-Lovedid not respond to a request for comment.

The Donald Griffin '23 Management Award was given to two recipients, Maria Bohn and Karla Ewalt.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

The award, establishedin the name of Donald Griffin ’23, is given by the Office of Human Resources to assist administrators whose experience indicate potential for expansion of leadership skills.

The award comes with a $2,500 grant to engage in professional activities, such as leadership conferences or other professional development programs.

Bohn, program coordinator for theCommunity-Based Learning Initiative,works on community-engaged research and sharing knowledge to the community. The initiative involves encouraging students to synthesize their findings from their research or various on-campus projects to make it easily accessible to the general public, Bohn said.

“I was really honored just to be nominated, and it is thrilling for CBLI, for myself, and for ODOC that we won because I know that this opportunity will give us great connections to make more projects and develop them in exciting ways that I haven’t thought of yet,” Bohn said.

With the Griffin Award grant, Bohn will be attending the Lead New Jersey Fellow Program in 2017. Bohn said that she is looking forward to meeting people from across the state to expand the CBLI network.

In addition to participating in the Program next year, Bohn said that the Office of the Dean of College is working on new initiatives, including freshman seminars in service that are being developed in response to a University task force. She will continue to work on the Derian/CBLI summer researchinternship, in which students are placed in nonprofit organizations to undergo research projects and serve the information needs of the host organization.

Ewalt has served as associate dean for research in the Office of the Dean for Research since 2008.

“I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of different things in order to foster the research enterprise and create resources that help profile the research that’s done on campus, to facilitate people to do the research that they want to do and to streamline it,” Ewalt said.

Ewalt works in research development, which encompasses the tasks of making the University more effective at competing for sponsored research funding. Sponsored research funding is money that comes from outside the University to support research and programs that happen at the University, namely federal funding, but also money from corporations or foundations.

When a faculty member proposes a project, whether large, complex, or multidisciplinary, to the federal government,the process goes beyond the science, Ewalt explained.

She works with faculty members on grant proposals, from training grants to big-center grants, in order to put together the most compelling proposals in a most efficient manner, she added.

“We are trying to develop a resource to help faculty members — PI’s — be as competitive as possible in competing for those dollars,” she explained.

Ewalt will attend the Annual Conference for Development Researchers sponsored by the National Development of Research Professionals in May, a three-day professional conference held in Orlando, Florida.

Ewalt added that research development is a growing field, and that over the last six to eight years, there has been a development of real expertise in how to most effectively help faculty members compete for grants.

“The sponsored dollars that come into the University affect your undergraduates who are doing research, your graduate students, your postdocs, and it’s the full scholarly life of the faculty members,” Ewalt explained.

The Office of Research works with various people from across the campus to help support projects and create strategically important grant proposals not only in the sciences and engineering, but also with the humanities and social sciences, or projects that have more of an institutional focus, according to Ewalt.

“I feel honored because we have an institution filled with dedicated and talented people at every level, so I think it’s [the award] a wonderful recognition and I feel very honored to receive it," Ewalt added.

Jaclyn Immordino, HR communications and event specialist in charge of the Service Recognition Lunch, declined to comment.

University Media Relations Specialist Min Pullan did not respond to requests for comment.