Professor Alon McCormick wins George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Service

Professor Alon McCormick is the recipient of the 2023 George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Service in the College of Science and Engineering (CSE). The award seeks to recognize a faculty member that has performed exemplary service within the University as well as in a professional capacity to outside public or governmental organizations.

At the department level, McCormick has served in the CEMS DEI Working Group in 2020, currently as faculty co-Chair. Together with the Mental Health Advocates program, he has been instrumental arranging inclusivity events for faculty and graduate students. Within the College, he has been an active member of the Diversity and Inclusion Alliance and has arranged inclusivity workshops for faculty and staff (often in collaboration with Chemistry Professor Lee Penn). At the University level, McCormick serves as Chair of the Senate Committee on Committees, where he focuses on recruiting faculty into crucial service roles for the Senate.

At the national level, he is involved with several engineering organizations, including the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET. In 2016, he was a founding member of the AIChE LGBTQ+&Allies Initiative - he currently serves as Chair of their programming committee, organizing and co-facilitating training sessions and panel discussions at AIChE meetings.  He is an AIChE Fellow and also serves on the AIChE Fellows Admissions Committee, the AIChE Institute Awards Committee, and the AIChE Education and Accreditation Committee. Within ASEE, Alon was a founding member of the Virtual Community of Practice for LGBTQ+ Advocacy, co-facilitating online and conference workshops on advocacy for LGBTQ+ engineering students. With ABET, Alon has served as Commissioner, as accreditation team co-chair for the last 5 years and as program evaluator before that. These service roles are vitally important to the engineering community.

The George W. Taylor Awards are endowed within CSE in memory of George W. Taylor, a 1934 graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. This award consists of an award citation and honorarium. A copy of the award citation is on permanent display outside the Taylor Undergraduate Academic Center in Lind Hall. Each year, one award may be made to a tenured or tenure-track faculty member in each of the categories of teaching, research, and service.