Dean's Medal Awards

Excellence in research and teaching

In recognition of academic excellence in research, teaching, and service, with an emphasis on significant contributions while in position in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at SFU, up to three Dean's Medals and one Lifetime Achievement Award will be awarded annually to tenured faculty.

2023 Dean's Medal Award Winners

Lifetime Achievement Award

Betty A. Schellenberg is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of ten books on eighteenth-century literary culture – about women writers, authorship, manuscript culture, literary coteries, Bluestockings, and the novelist Samuel Richardson. At the moment, she is especially interested in manuscript poetry collections in which people created “personal playlists” of their favourite poems, thereby leaving us a record of their tastes and how they saw themselves as active participants in literature.

Mark Pickup is a professor in the Department of Political Science. He is a specialist in political behaviour, political psychology and political methodology. Substantively, his research primarily falls into three areas: political identities and political decision-making; conditions of democratic responsiveness and accountability; and polls and electoral outcomes. His research focuses on political information, public opinion, political identities, norms and election campaigns within North American and European countries. 

Yue Wang is a professor in the Department of Linguistics. Her main areas of research are phonetics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive science. Using behavioral and neuro-imaging techniques, she has been studying the processing and acquisition of second-language speech sounds by both children and adults with the goal of learning more about brain plasticity as well as how multisensory brain systems cooperate functionally in cognitive processing. She is also the director of the Language and Brain Lab.

Past winners

2022: Eric Beauregard (Criminology); John McDonald (Psychology); Vaibhav Saria (Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies); Mary-Ellen Kelm (History)

2020-21: Nicolas Schmitt (Economics); Jodi Viljoen (Psychology); Jennifer S. Wong (Criminology) 

2019: Anke Kessler (Economics); Jennifer Spear (History); Grace Iarocci (Psychology)