Outstanding Faculty Service Award for Professor Louis Liotta

The Outstanding Faculty Service Leadership Award is given to a full-time faculty member whose service and leadership have significantly advanced the mission of Stonehill College. The Faculty Academic Vision statement affirms that “a Stonehill education prepares students for meaningful lives by encouraging service to the common good, the practice of responsible citizenship, and the pursuit of professional and personal fulfillment.” As we expect this for our students, we expect the same from our faculty. Therefore, public service and service to the academic community are highly valued by the faculty at Stonehill College. This award recognizes a cumulative record of noteworthy accomplishment in service and leadership on the part of a faculty member. The recipient stands as a symbol of the entire faculty’s commitment to sustaining our community. In 2022, Stonehill College is proud to bestow the Outstanding Faculty Service Leadership Award on Professor Louis Liotta.

Your commitment to Stonehill’s mission is abundantly clear to all who work with you. While compiling an excellent teaching portfolio and a record of scholarly achievement, you also exemplify the qualities that we ask our faculty to model for our students and the broader Stonehill community as they lead lives of purpose.

During your 29 years at Stonehill, you have offered unparalleled wisdom while tirelessly engaging in service to the College. What particularly stands out is that you have mentored over 110 students in your lab conducting synthetic organic and bioorganic chemistry. What is also remarkable and clear evidence of your commitment to student development is that 92 students conducted fulltime research under your mentorship during every summer since you joined the College in the fall of 1993, with the unfortunate exception of the summer of 2020. You have served as the thesis advisor for 44 students, have mentored over 70 students who have presented their research at regional and national conferences, and seven of your peer-reviewed articles have student co-authors.

You have accrued external grant funding in excess of $4 million—the most funding secured by any faculty member in the College’s history. The vast majority of that funding was not to support your work but rather that of your science colleagues, with whom you share the common goal of supporting and creating opportunities for Stonehill science students.

In 1995 you wrote a successful National Science Foundation grant that funded the installation of air conditioning in Merket-Tracy Hall, which at the time, was the Merkert-Tracy Science Center. This infrastructure investment expanded learning for students who could now conduct full-time faculty-mentored research during the summers. You were the principal driver for the establishment of the SURE program in the summer of 1996—the summer when the air conditioning was being installed in Merkert Tracy. You have chaired the SURE Review Committee over its entire 25-year history, and during that time, more than 600 students have engaged in fulltime research in the SURE program.

As a result of your vision, the SURE program has also served as a scaffold for additional student research projects funded by various federal agencies and foundations, including grants from the National Science Foundation (STEP/S-STEM, CAREER, Noyce, RUI), NASA, the Lloyd G Balfour Foundation, Research Corporation, American Chemical Society, and the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Always seeking to expand and improve opportunities, you were instrumental in securing support from Project SEED, an ACS-sponsored program that brings academically talented high school students to campus to conduct fulltime research alongside chemistry and biochemistry SURE Scholar mentors.

And so, with deep pride, we confer the 2022 Outstanding Faculty Service Leadership Award to you, Professor Louis Liotta, for your tireless service, consistent example, and exemplary contributions to Stonehill College.

Given this 15th day of August,

Two Thousand Twenty-Two

Rev. John Denning, C.S.C., President

DeBrenna L. Agbényiga, Ph.D., MBA, MSW, Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs