The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Illinois International Programs are pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 International Achievement Awards.
The winners—who range from alumni, to faculty and students—will be celebrated for their work at the annual International Achievement Awards banquet on April 13th, 2017 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center in Urbana. The recipients will also participate in a panel discussion titled “Service in a Global Context” on April 13th at 8:30am. The panel is free and open to the public with a reservation. Breakfast will be provided.
The 2016 International Achievement Award recipients are:
H.E. Rev. Dr. Iva Gloudon
Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement
Dr. Helaine Silverman
Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement
Brittany Koteles
Charles C. Stewart International Young Humanitarian Award
Ann-Perry Witmer
Illinois International Graduate Achievement Award
Renee Keyvan
Illinois International Undergraduate Achievement Award
Recipient Biographies
Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement
H.E. Rev. Dr. Iva Gloudon
Established in 2000, the Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement is awarded annually to a distinguished international alumnus or alumna who has helped to better their own nation or the world through their contributions to government, humanity, science, art or human welfare. Her Excellency Rev. Dr. Iva Camille Gloudon in October 2015 completed a four-and-a-half-year diplomatic assignment as the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago’s High Commissioner to Jamaica; nonresident Ambassador to the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti and Permanent Representative to the International Seabed Authority.
She has also worked for over thirty years in the field of Sport and Physical Education culminating in her professional position for twenty-five years as Director of Sport and Physical Education at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
Dr. Gloudon was an accomplished field hockey athlete and represented Trinidad and Tobago internationally for over ten years. She was the 1979 Trinidad and Tobago Women’s Hockey Player of the Year and in 1992 became the first and only woman to win the Trinidad and Tobago Sports Administrator of the Year award. In 2000, she was named one of her country’s top 20 Sport Administrators of the Millennium. She is also a past president of the Trinidad and Tobago Women’s Hockey Association and the Trinidad and Tobago Women’s Football Association.
Dr. Gloudon is a recipient of a Trinidad and Tobago National Sports Scholarship (1980) which enabled her to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA where she completed her Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees. She is also a recipient of the Commonwealth Sports Award (2012) and the Caribbean Awards for Sport Icons (2015).
Dr. Gloudon has taught at all levels of education—from elementary school to university—in various local and international institutions.
She is the founder and director of University Placement Consultancy Limited, a nonprofit/philanthropic organization that facilitates the international university placement of high school students from Trinidad and Tobago and across the Caribbean.
Dr. Gloudon has been a practicing Christian for the past twenty years and is a member of Trinidad Christian Center where she is an ordained Minister of the Gospel.
Dr. Gloudon has mothered three girls, Jamila, Q’wando and Shania.
Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement
Dr. Helaine Silverman
The Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement is presented to faculty with profound international accomplishments in teaching, research and public service. Helaine Silverman is Professor of Anthropology and Director of CHAMP/Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy at Illinois. Her research focuses on the cooperative and conflictual production of archaeological monuments and living historic centers as heritage sites for visual, performative, economic and political consumption as undertaken by national governments, regional authorities, local administrations, community stakeholders, and the global tourism industry. Most of her research around these issues is conducted in Peru and England. She also leads a CHAMP project called “The Mythic Mississippi,” which is studying the heritage of the Illinois section of this historic river. This project will generate policy for improving and integrating sustainable tourism, heritage management, economic development and historic preservation in our state. She has just begun a comparative project on heritage conflict in physically divided capitals (Nicosia, Belfast, Berlin, Beirut, and Jerusalem).
In addition to her own authored works, Dr. Silverman is the editor/co-editor of: Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2006), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (Springer, 2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (Springer, 2009), Contested Cultural Heritage (Springer, 2011), Cultural Heritage Politics in China (Springer, 2013), Encounters with Popular Pasts (Springer, 2015) and Heritage in Action (Springer, 2017). She serves on the editorial boards of American Anthropologist, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Heritage & Society, World Art, Built Heritage, and Thema. She is the co-editor of two book series: “Heritage, Tourism, and Community” (Routledge) and “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Archaeological Heritage Management” (Springer).
Dr. Silverman is an Expert Member of ICOMOS’ International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM) and ICOMOS’s International Scientific Committee on Cultural Tourism (ICTC)—these organizations advise UNESCO on its famous World Heritage List. Dr. Silverman also was an expert consultant on the successful U.S. nomination of Poverty Point to the World Heritage List and she consults on the U.S. Tentative List Site of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. She has been a keynote speaker on cultural rights at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva and in September she will be serve as an expert member on a UNESCO panel considering the reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.
Her passion on campus is CHAMP. Over the past decade, she has brought together more than two dozen faculty members from more than a dozen departments in six colleges as well as the two campus museums under the CHAMP umbrella. Through her leadership, CHAMP has grown to campus-wide, national and international prominence through its campus and international conferences, book series, and the educational excellence of its graduate minors in Heritage Studies and in Museum Studies. The latter are enhancing career opportunities for our graduate students as proven by their post-graduation employment. For all these reasons CHAMP has been sought out as a formal institutional partner of the distinguished Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham, UK, and the Critical Heritage Studies Network at Stockholm University, Sweden.
Charles C. Stewart International Young Humanitarian Award Winner
Brittany Koteles
In 2011, she pursued a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona, where she spent three years uncovering, sharing, and advancing the story of social entrepreneurship in Spain. There, she wrote the book Stories of Scale, nine case studies of social entrepreneurs from across the country; taught & spoke about social entrepreneurship in public schools; and helped form the launch team for the Barcelona Impact Hub, a community space for local social innovators.
She currently directs the Fellowship program for Ashoka, the world’s largest network of leading social entrepreneurs. In this role, she designs tools, experiences, and opportunities for the 200+ Ashoka Fellows based in the United States, serving as a social sector “dot-connector,” helping Fellows maximize their impact, and writing about trends in the field of social entrepreneurship. She also helped to launch a new initiative to diversify the Ashoka Fellowship, especially in terms of race, gender, and geography; an initiative that has had ramifications on other global programs at Ashoka.
Brittany is active in the Washington DC community as a facilitator, improviser, activist, and dabbling filmmaker. She is currently designing an alternative, secular chaplaincy program to support the inner growth of the world’s leading changemakers, in collaboration with the Open Master’s network.
Illinois International Graduate Achievement Award
Ann-Perry Witmer
The Illinois International Graduate Achievement Award recognizes a graduate student whose innovative and sustained international research or public service abroad has had the greatest impact (or has the greatest potential impact) on the university, larger community or internationally.
Ann-Perry Witmer has followed a curious path through life, ultimately coming to engineering in midlife when she enrolled here at the University of Illinois’ College of Engineering after a successful career in newspapering. After graduating with honors in 2002, she became a practicing professional engineer in Wisconsin, designing water systems for communities throughout the Midwest. She also helped to create organizations that work directly with communities in Central America and the Caribbean to provide engineering assistance for disadvantaged communities in need of safe, sustainable drinking water. This global perspective informed her engineering approach domestically by incorporating a collaborative, holistic understanding of the client’s needs and expectations to produce a durable, sustainable infrastructure.
Ann now teaches freshman engineering electives as well as engineering service design courses at the university, and she is faculty advisor to Engineers Without Borders-UIUC and AWWA/WEF. Her service travels have taken her to Central America, Africa, Asia and South America, where she’s developed a deep understanding of the relationship between technical and social considerations that must be co-evaluated for communities in need. It also led her to pursue graduate studies in International Engineering Effectiveness, first through the Civil Engineering Department for her master’s degree and now through Agricultural and Biological Engineering for her PhD.
In addition to her engineering degree from the University of Illinois, Ann also holds degrees in journalism and art history magna cum laude from Boston University.
Illinois International Undergraduate Achievement Award
Renee Keyvan
The Illinois International Undergraduate Achievement Award recognizes an undergraduate student for a significant service or contribution resulting from participation in an international study course, program or project. Renee Keyvan is a recent Global Studies graduate at Illinois. Her concentration was in Human Rights within the Middle East, specifically Iran. She also minored in Study of the Islamic World. Renee dedicated her entire undergraduate to learning inside and outside the classroom about international issues. She studied abroad in Istanbul, Turkey, underwent intensive training to gain certifications in mediation, rape crisis intervention, and LGBTQ+ Ally, interned at Strong Heart Group which focused on contributing to the end of child marriage, and was involved in various student organizations such as Global Studies Leaders.
Renee has also been a recipient of two Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to study Persian at Illinois and at University of Maryland, an I4I study abroad scholarship, the Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Scholarship, and the Carlene and Andy Ziegler Scholarship.