PSU Salutes award ceremony today

Portland State will hand out its PSU Salutes awards to recognize its alumni and faculty members for their career accomplishments. The ceremony will be held at the Governor Hotel in Portland. 

According to Mary Coniglio, associate director of Alumni Relations, the Salute awards are a way to recognize PSU’s outstanding alumni and faculty for their career achievements, volunteer service and professional distinctions. Coniglio said that PSU’s alumni population has over 120,000 graduates, making the winners of the Salute awards a select few. 

The PSU Salutes program is now in its 22nd year of existence. About two years ago, the award program underwent some major changes.

It now more narrowly focuses on alumni and some award categories have been removed, according to Coniglio. 

The PSU Alumni Association awards only five winners each year. The program recognizes alums in different professional fields at different stages in their careers. The awards include: the outstanding international alumni award, the distinguished alumni award, the distinguished alumni service award, the outstanding young alumni award and the distinguished faculty achievement award. 

The winners are chosen through a nomination process in which anyone is free to make a nomination. A volunteer selection committee then chooses the winners out of those nominated. The award recipients are meant to represent the entire university, with winners in a variety of disciplines. 

This year’s outstanding international alumni award will be given to André Craan for his work as a scientific evaluator in the field of biotechnology for Health Canada. He also works as a professor of toxicology and biology of pollutants at the University of Quebec at Montreal. 

The distinguished alumni award will be presented to Angela Wykoff, a retired executive from Bonneville Power Administration. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mathematics, as well as a bachelor’s in civil engineering from PSU. Wykoff was also a member of the search committees that hired PSU President Wim Wiewel and Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean Renjeng Su, and the president of the Alumni Association from 2006–07.

The distinguished alumni service award goes to Amber Fowler. Fowler is the founder and CEO of Dress for Success Inland Northwest, an organization that provides support and career clothing for women. Fowler also holds many corporate positions involving marketing and communications, including her role as corporate communications manager for the Portland Trail Blazers. 

The outstanding young alumni award will be awarded to Nabil Mistkawi, who graduated from PSU with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 2010. Mistkawi is a research scientist and development engineer at Intel Corporation. He invented a chemical formulation that aided the production of Intel’s new generations of microprocessors. He was also the inventor of nine patent applications while still in graduate school at PSU. 

Lastly, the distinguished faculty achievement award will be given to Sherril Gelmon. Gelmon has been a professor at PSU for 17 years. She is a professor of public health, as well as the chair of the Division of Public Administration. Through teaching classes that focus on community-based learning, Gelmon is involved with over 20 Oregon organizations, mostly in the medical field. She is also a sitting board member of the Oregon Foundation for Reproductive Health. 

 “I hope that it’s very inspiring to students to see what [PSU] alumni have accomplished,” Gelmon said. 

The PSU Salutes awards banquet will be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Governor Hotel’s third floor Grand Ballroom. The master of ceremonies will be the current president of the PSU Alumni Association, Behzad Hosseini.

Tickets are $20 per person, $15 for PSU Alumni Association members and $10 for current PSU students. ?