2024 President's Awards honor ASU projects for real-world impact
Photo by Tim Trumble
Ten Arizona State University programs were honored for their real-world solutions during the annual President’s Awards ceremony held on Dec. 6.
The awards formally recognize successful solutions in innovation, social embeddedness, sustainability, global engagement and transdisciplinary collaboration, and celebrate the commitment and contributions of ASU employees.
“The people, ideas and initiatives recognized by the President’s Awards represent the tremendous scope of talent, innovation and service that fuels ASU and its mission,” ASU President Michael M. Crow said. “These teams are tackling our hallmark challenges, and through their imaginative work, they are improving individual lives and our collective future.”
Here are the 2024 recipients:
President’s Award for Global Engagement
This community-led and student-driven project is working to reduce the amount of plastic pollution being left in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains National Park. Engineering students at Arizona State University and the Addis Ababa Institute of Technology are working together to build a pipeline that uses small machines to transform plastic waste into value-added goods to be sold for profit by people living outside the park.
President’s Award for Principled Innovation
Annotation-efficient deep learning for computer-aided diagnosis of medical imaging
There is intense interest in adopting computer-aided diagnosis, or CAD, systems, particularly those developed based on deep-learning algorithms, for applications in a number of medical specialties. In this thesis dissertation, lead author Zongwei Zhou addresses “how to develop efficient and effective deep-learning algorithms for medical applications where large annotated datasets are unavailable.”
The Humanities Lab provides students with the opportunity to engage in hands-on research on compelling social challenges while working with others who are also invested in making a difference. Learn more about some of their work on ASU News.
President’s Award for Sustainability
Business and Finance launched the Shared Fleet pilot program at the University Services Building on the Tempe campus in July 2023. The pilot assessed the viability of a university-wide shared fleet of electric vehicles. It found that Shared Fleet would help ASU achieve its sustainability goals, lower fleet-related costs and provide efficient access to shared vehicles. Business and Finance units can register and reserve vehicles through the pilot program.
Piloted in fall 2022 by University Sustainability Practices, the program is funded by strategic partner Coca-Cola to train student representatives to serve as stewards of sustainability for their residential communities.
The consortium is a global organization with more than 100 members dedicated to improving the sustainability of consumer products. Its members and partners include manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, service providers, NGOs, civil society organizations, governmental agencies and academics.
President’s Award for Transdisciplinary Collaboration
Language and Dyslexia Screening Questionnaire
In this thesis dissertation, lead author Kathleen Swartz addresses the lack of dyslexia screening measures for English-speaking monolingual children and that those that are available for bilingual children are not widely used. In the study, the ASU Bilingual Language and Literacy Lab, the Child Language and Literacy Lab, Learning to Soar Tutoring, Healing Hearts Pediatrics and Phoenix Children’s collaborated to develop the Dyslexia Screening Questionnaire that is offered in both English and Spanish.
President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness
Arizona STEM Acceleration Project
Supported by the AZ Department of Education and the APS Foundation, this $10 million project provides direct support, resources and funding to Arizona’s K–12 educators in an effort to enhance and accelerate STEM activities in schools across state. Participating educators receive lesson planning resources, participate in a network learning hub and have developed more than 1,500 high-quality STEM lesson plans, available via an online portal to teachers everywhere.
The RV CoLab Future Cities Program: Empowering Community Voices through Immersive Technology
This project is a collaboration between the city of Mesa, Mesa Public Schools, Logan Simpson, and Arizona State University's Resilient Visions Collaboratory (RV CoLab) and Media and Immersive Experience (MIX) Center. It uses mixed reality to facilitate how a master plan of an American city is formed and materialized through public involvement.
A project from University City Exchange, this planning initiative aims to revitalize the Salt and Gila River corridor in Phoenix through a multitude of efforts at the regional, subregional and local scale.
More University news
ASU summer program honored with 2025 Award for Mathematics Programs that Make a Difference
The Joaquin Bustoz Math-Science Honors Program (JBMSHP) at Arizona State University has been honored with the 2025 Award for Mathematics Programs that Make a Difference from the American Mathematical…
ASU student earns prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship to study in China
The day that Schwarzman Scholarship candidates began getting notified that they had been chosen for the prized scholarship, Arizona State University student Jordan Harb kept an eye on the group chat…
New facilities focus on enhancing university experience
Arizona State University continues to meet the growing demand for academic and housing facilities on campus as part of its annual construction scope of more than 150 capital projects — a nearly $400…