2023 winners of UIC Global Engagement Faculty Award

2023 winners of UIC Global Engagement Faculty Award

The Office of Global Engagement is pleased to announce the 2023 winners of the  Piergiorgio L.E. Uslenghi Global Engagement Faculty Award and the Emerging Global Engagement Faculty Leader Award.

The awards recognize and celebrate faculty who have made outstanding contributions to UIC’s global engagement in support of UIC’s internationalization vision “to serve the citizens of Chicago and the world by being an international leader in research, scholarship, and innovation, and by creating a globally connected campus community which supports faculty, staff, and students as they address the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.”

The Global Engagement Faculty awardee is Dr. Stevan Weine, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Global Health, College of Medicine.

Since joining UIC in 1995, Dr. Weine has focused much of his scholarship, teaching, and service on improving mental health associated with migration and trauma in places like Kosovo, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan as well as amongst refugee and migrant communities in the U.S. Dr. Weine’s focus has been building in-country capacity in low resourced countries. By way of an example, one of his current projects is training non-specialists in 18 clinics across Tajikistan to expand women’s mental health care. Because of this work, Dr. Weine is internationally recognized as an expert and leader in the field.

As Director of the Center for Global Health, Dr. Weine leads a unit of 15 core and 11 affiliate faculty members with projects in 19 countries. The Center has been remarkably successful in obtaining grants which totaled nearly $1.5m this past year.

In addition, Dr. Weine has served as a mentor and teacher of international students and residents at UIC and abroad. He is the author or co-author of 69 referred journal articles as well as 3 books, including his most recent, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Turned Madness into Revolutionary Poetry (2023).

The recipient of the Emerging Global Engagement Faculty Leader Award is Dr. Gwyneth Franck, Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Office of Global Health Leadership in the College of Nursing.

Since joining UIC in 2017, Dr. Franck has been a major force in expanding global engagement in the College of Nursing. Typically, nursing students are one of the most underrepresented disciplines in study abroad, which makes Dr. Franck’s achievements even more notable. She developed one of the first faculty-directed study abroad programs in the college, the Disaster Preparedness and Global Health in the Caribbean Program. During the program UIC students from various colleges work with government and health officials in St. Kitts and Nevis to learn culturally relevant and situationally aware approaches to health care. In addition, Dr. Franck has guided other Nursing faculty members to create three additional faculty-directed programs in Spain, Rwanda, and Ireland.

In addition to her outstanding contributions to study abroad, Dr. Franck served as a visiting resident scholar at the University of Navarra in Spring 2023. While there she taught a course on pediatric nursing, participated in collaborative research, helped to develop a service-learning project involving K-12 students, and developed a bilateral student exchange between UIC and Navarra. Dr. Franck has also made internationally recognized contributions to the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis disaster resilience. She also has a robust scholarly output including twenty-three peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Dr. Franck shared that “her commitment to global learning began with a study abroad program as an undergraduate biomedical engineering student. Because of the degree requirements, a semester abroad was not possible, so I participated in a faculty-directed program on St. Kitts and Nevis on Disaster Preparedness and Public Health. This experience led to a fourteen-year partnership with the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, engaging in teaching, research, and community service with students and the disaster management directors in St. Kitts and Nevis. Because health care students often have fewer study abroad opportunities due to their curricular and clinical requirements, I am committed to leading and supporting study abroad programs that will allow our students to access the same transformative learning that I experienced.”

Drs. Weine and Franck will receive their Piergiorgio L.E. Uslenghi Global Engagement Faculty Awards at the Fall semester Faculty Awards Ceremony.