The Dean's Scholar Award recognizes faculty candidates for promotion who excel in both teaching and scholarship or creative work. The two-year awards carry a one-time grant, which may be used for equipment, travel, supplies, and other support for research and teaching initiatives.
These faculty development awards are funded by the UI Alumni Association's endowment of the Dean's Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. The CLAS Committee on Faculty Promotion and Tenure selects each year's class of Dean's Scholars from among those faculty recommended for promotion and/or tenure.
2025-2027
Jamel Brinkley
Jamel Brinkley is an associate professor in the Department of English and an alum of the Writers’ Workshop. His research focuses on works of fiction. Brinkley is the author of multiple short story collections. His 2023 collection, Witness: Stories, received the Maya Angelou Book Award, and his 2018 collection, A Lucky Man, won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In addition to literary recognition, he received scholarships during the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Summer Workshop.
Kristi Hendrickson
Kristi Hendrickson is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Her research focuses on how listeners and readers recognize written and spoken words, how they attach words to meaning, and how they use words earlier in a sentence to predict upcoming words. Alongside her research staff, Hendrickson uses eye-tracking and EEG (electroencephalogram) to examine a range of populations, including children and adults, individuals with hearing loss, and dual language learners.
Rishab Nithyanand
Rishab Nithyanand is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research is broadly in the areas of privacy and social computing. His research aims to improve transparency and accountability in the online data ecosystem. He is also the leader of the SPARTA lab, holds a courtesy appointment in the College of Law, and co-directs the Center for Publics, Platforms, and Personalization (CP3).
2024-2026
Casey DeRoo
Casey DeRoo is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests include high energy astrophysics and astronomical instrumentation. He specializes in x-ray spectroscopy of supernova remnants, instrument design / raytracing for sounding rockets, CubeSats, Explorer, and flagship missions, x-ray grating fabrication and testing, grazing incidence mirrors, and identification of unusual astronomical sources using machine learning. He works with students to interact with collaborators at NASA, Harvard-Smithsonian, and other institutions around the world.
Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is an associate professor in the Department of English. Her research interests include contemporary American poetry, African American poetry and poetics, and ecopoetics. Kelly is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment of the Arts fellow, and founding member of the collective, Poets at the End of the World. She has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center.
Bennett Sims
Bennett Sims is an associate professor in the Department of English. He is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the collection White Dialogues. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
2023-2025
Louisa Hall
Louisa Hall’s work involves interrogations of fiction, biography, science, science fiction, and the ethics of writing about other people, animals, and things. She is the author of Reproduction, Trinity and Speak. Trinity was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Award and the winner of the Langum Prize for historical fiction; Speak was a Best Book of the Year in NPR, Slate, the Washington Post, and Men's Journal. She has also authored several poems and scholarly essays relevant to her field.
David Miles
David Miles’s research focuses on space physics. More specifically, he researches space weather, solar-terrestrial physics, and auroral dynamics, interpretation of space-based magnetic field measurements, development of spaceflight instrumentation to make high-resolution measurements of magnetic fields, instrument Co-PI of the magnetic field instrument on the Cassiope/e-POP Spacecraft, and instrument PI and is a student mentor for the Ex-Alta 1 CubeSat.
2022-2024
Allison Jaynes
Allison N. Jaynes’s research focuses on experimental space physics, particularly inner magnetosphere particle dynamics. She is also the former recipient of the University of Iowa Postdoctoral Association Mentor Award. She currently also serves as Co-Lead on the SCOSTEP PRESTO committee for predictions of the Sun-Earth environment, and as a member of both the AGU Nomination Task Force and National Academies study on Increasing PI Diversity and Inclusion in the Leadership of Competed Space Missions.