LSU External Awards & Recognition Program
Supporting Faculty Excellence Through National Recognition
The External Awards & Recognition Program provides LSU faculty and academic leadership with centralized strategic support to identify, apply for, and attain external awards at the national level. While all national awards are valued, LSU particularly encourages the pursuit of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards as identified by the National Research Council. In addition, the program showcases current recipients of all national/international external awards, including recipients of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards, to increase awareness of outstanding faculty accomplishments.
We want to hear about your involvement with all awards of national distinction! Please
submit all national-level award nominations and/or selections here.
Links for Faculty Members
Dr. Gabriela González signing into the National Academy of Sciences.
– Photo: National Academy of Sciences
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More than 200 LSU faculty have received awards and honors classified by the National Research Council as highly prestigious or prestigious.
Highly prestigious awards are awards designated as such by the National Research Council (NRC). There are over 200 awards designated on the NRC's list of highly prestigious awards. A university's highly prestigious award count is a key metric for national university rankings. The Office of Academic Affairs is currently supporting recipients of highly prestigious awards with a $10,000 stipend.*
A Prestigious Pathway award is defined by LSU as any national/international award that is a statistically significant precedent or "pathway" to a highly prestigious award. We classify an award as a prestigious pathway award if at least 25% of highly prestigious award winners previously received that award. The list will be updated annually so it will be based on current data. The Office of Academic Affairs is currently supporting recipients of prestigious pathway awards with a $5,000 stipend.*
*Funding for stipends is contingent upon fiscal availability and subject to change based on budgetary constraints.
LSU Craft and Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering Assistant Professor Olufemi “Femi” Olorode recently received a $500,000 NSF CAREER Award for his cutting-edge energy research that will improve hydrogen gas storage in solid hydrate structures.
LSU Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Chris Marvel recently received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which recognizes early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
John A. Pojman Sr., the William and Patricia Senn, Jr., Distinguished Professor and Chair of the LSU Department of Chemistry, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
LSU Chemistry Professor Les Butler has been named a 2024 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the fields of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and X-ray interferometry imaging.
Dr. Nick Mason, Assistant Professor and Curator of Birds at Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science (LSUMNS), has been awarded the highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. This prestigious grant, totaling over one million dollars over five years, will support Mason’s groundbreaking research on high-elevation bird species in the Andes while fostering opportunities for undergraduate students in biodiversity science.
LSU Chemistry Professor Receives NSF CAREER Award to Advance Research on Plant Growth and Resilience
Assistant Professor Amy Xu from the LSU Department of Chemistry received a National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the research foundation’s most prestigious award that supports early-career faculty. Xu’s project explores how proteins and complex sugars, known as polysaccharides, interact in the crowded environments of plant cells, a process critical for plant survival and growth.