The Anthropology Dept. held its annual awards banquet on 9 June, 2008 at Iovino's Restaurant on the riverfront in Corvallis. Approximately 30 faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends were in attendance. After a brief presentation by David McMurray, Chair, of new developments within the Department, 5 awards were handed out, each one carrying a $1,000 gift.

Our first award was the Study Abroad Award. The winner this year was Emily Dray. The award is so-named because it honors an anthropology major who is investing time and energy into studying outside the US. Emily will be going to Tunisia this coming Fall quarter to study French. She has also been corresponding with the World Health Organization office in Tunis and will be staying on for a few weeks afterwards to work on a project investigating the widespread skin disease, Leishmaniasis. This research will form the basis of her International degree thesis.

Our second award, the Service to Undergraduate Education Award, this year went to our newest PhD student, Sarah Cunningham. Sarah received her BA and MA degrees from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She then taught for a year at Heidelberg College in Ohio. Sarah came to OSU last fall and was immediately thrown into our introductory anthropology class, ANTHRO 110. Prof. Rosenberger, Sarah’s advisor, had just overhauled the class and so it was much more of a hands-on course than in the past. Only very competent, experienced teaching assistants were allowed to do this job. Sarah did not bat an eye, but plunged right in, quarter after quarter, proving that she was a master teacher.We all thank Sarah very much for her contributions to improving undergraduate education at OSU.

Our Third Award, the Alumni Award went this year to Courtney Everson. This award is supported by donations every year to the Department from alumni and goes to a student with a GPA of 3.5 or better who has a career interest in anthropology and has been involved in community, campus or professional anthropological activities. Courtney certainly fits the bill. She was the Community Program Intern for the Oregon & SW Washington Affiliate of Komen for the Cure in 2007, and currently serves as a Community Outreach Lecturer for their Speaker’s Bureau Educational Program. She is also actively engaged in research and education on midwifery practices. She is co-researcher with Dr. Melissa Cheyney on a project and currently serves as a data reviewer for the Midwives Alliance of North America. Courtney also serves as the Graduate Student Coordinator for the new Reproductive Health Laboratory in the Department, where she participates in research projects on reproductive health and assists in coordinating outreach events on the OSU campus and in the Corvallis community.

Our fourth award honors one of our talented fixed-term instructors. This year’s recipient was Mary Nolan. Mary, who is ABD at Southern Methodist University, has been teaching with us for several years. She has become irreplaceable as a teacher of several of our Bacc Core courses, our writing intensive course, and a rotating group of upper division courses for our majors, including Business Anthropology, Anthropology of Migration, Anthropology of Tourism and, the one for which she is most well-known amongst undergrads: The Anthropology of CyberCultures. The photo of Mary shows her next to her Second Life avatar.

Our final Award of the night was the most prized: the Buck Davis Memorial Scholarship Award. Steve Jenevein was this year's recipient. Thanks to a generous donation every year from Mrs. Buck Davis in honor of her husband, who taught for many decades in the department, we are able to give this award to a deserving student involved in field archaeology. Steve works as a field archaeologist for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs while he is simultaneously an MA student at OSU. His thesis involves modeling the distribution of ancient coastal land forms to better predict whether they may contain archaeological sites. We heartily thank Mrs. Davis for joining us each year and for providing the money to make this gift possible.

The final photo shows emeritus faculty member Court Smith on the left chatting with Lew Nelson, the Department's highly esteemed Mac repairman, who was invited to the banquet to honor his years of service spent keeping us up and running.