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-level awards, including recipients of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards, to increase awareness of outstanding faculty accomplishments.
Please see below for information about the features of the program, including the External Awards and Recognition Ceremony for all national award recipients, the stipend program for recipients of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards, the application for the course release program, and the petition to add a new award to LSU's list of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards. Questions? Contact externalawards@lsu.edu.
We want to hear about your involvement with all awards of national distinction! Please
submit all national-level award nominations and/or selections here.
To be held annually in early spring, the External Awards and Recognition Ceremony will honor all recipients of national awards during the previous calendar year. At the ceremony, recipients of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards will also be honored with a stipend (amounts to be determined).
Starting in the fall of 2025, faculty may apply for a course release program, which will grant them time to prepare proposal/applications for highly prestigious awards.
Faculty may petition to have an award added to the highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards listing. The award must be highly competitive and bring international and/or national visibility to LSU.
Dr. Gabriela González signing into the National Academy of Sciences.
– Photo: National Academy of Sciences
200
More than 200 LSU faculty have received awards and honors classified by the National Research Council as highly prestigious or prestigious.
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).
Fahui Wang, Cyril & Tutta Vetter Alumni Professor in the LSU Department of Geography & Anthropology, has been named as a 2025 Fellow for the American Association of Geographers.
Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Manas Ranjan Gartia has been elected a fellow to the National Academy of Inventors.
Funded research projects highlight the success of LSU's Scholarship First Agenda to advance foundational and applied science to improve lives.
The American Chemical Society, one of the world's largest scientific societies, has named Zakiya Wilson-Kennedy, Associate Dean for Academic Innovation & Engagement for the College of Science and Ron and Dr. Mary Neal Distinguished Associate Professor of Chemistry Education, a 2024 ACS Fellow.
Two faculty members from the College of Science, Sophie Warny and Joseph Giaime, have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Department of Environmental Sciences Professor Ed Laws has been named a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
LSU Construction Management Assistant Professor Ali Kazemian has been named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences and was recently invited to give a talk at its symposium in Southern California on his research in Lunar robotic construction.
Why It's Important
External awards can provide much deserved acknowledgment for career achievements, contributions to a specialized field of study and innovative research projects. It can increase visibility, learning opportunists, access to resources and scholarly collaboration.
Awards increase your visibility and expand recognition for your work among colleagues and the the community.
Awards broaden learning opportunities through interdisciplinary collaboration, travel, residencies and fellowships.
Awards provide much needed resources, including funding, time and access to members only benefits.
Awards present exciting collaborative opportunities and offer faculty an expanded community of scholars.
Highly prestigious awards, including induction into the National Academies, represent the pinnacle of recognition in academia. The National Research Council denotes the Highly Prestigious Award designation to more than 200 awards, honors, and recognitions across the arts and humanities, physical sciences and engineering, social sciences, and life sciences. In addition to bringing increased visibility and elevating opportunities for faculty recipients, these highly prestigious awards are noted by the AAU as a metric for institutional membership and are important in university rankings.
Prestigious pathway awards include both early career awards for research (e.g., National Science Foundation CAREER Award) as well as career achievement awards (e.g., American Academy for the Advancement of Science Fellow). The prestigious awards in the following list are precedents or “pathways” to highly prestigious awards. We classify any award as a Pathway Award if at least 25% of highly prestigious award winners had previously received that award.
