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April 27, 2009
PCSW awards duos for leadership in mentoring

By kim Urquhart

The President’s Commission on the Status of Women recently recognized four distinguished faculty with the Mentoring for Leadership Award. The third annual award honors success in leadership in the context of a mentoring relationship in which at least one member is female, to pay tribute to the process of mentoring and to acknowledge the critical roles played by both mentor and mentee.

The winning pairs were Karen Stolley, associate professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Vialla Hartfield-Mendez, senior lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese; and Sheryl Heron, assistant dean for medical education and student affairs, Emory School of Medicine and associate professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, and Nadine Kaslow, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and chief psychologist, Grady Health System.

“Ours is a mentoring relationship that began over 20 years ago and has continued to support and nourish us through a long series of institutional, intellectual, pedagogical and personal challenges and accomplishments,” wrote Stolley and Hartfield-Mendez. The most important aspect of their shared work in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the pair noted, was breaking down the barriers that separate tenure- and lecture-track faculty through collaborations on programming, curricular development and faculty governance.

Heron and Kaslow said their mentoring relationship capitalized on their diversity as well as shared values, a collaboration that has resulted not only in papers, grants, awards and leadership appointments, but also in friendship. Kaslow’s strength in research and Heron’s commitment to community engagement resulted in mutual involvement as board members on the Women’s Resource Center to End Domestic Violence for the past five years, the pair noted.

In presenting the awards, Tiffany Worboy of the PCSW’s Women in Leadership Subcommittee thanked the recipients “for inspiring us and each other — and for demonstrating the power, potential and scope of a mentoring relationship.”