2026 Awards of Excellence

Each year, the University of Washington presents Awards of Excellence to recognize exceptional contributions to the UW and the community. Recipients for 2026 include the following faculty, graduate students, and alumni from the College of Arts & Sciences. All information about the honorees is excerpted from presentations at the UW Awards of Excellence ceremony on June 11, 2026.

Distinguished Teaching Award

Megan Callow
Teaching Professor
Department of English

Megan is the founding director of Writing@UW, a program that fosters a tri‑campus culture of writing and centralized support for faculty who teach writing. She models reflective, learner‑centered pedagogy that emphasizes metacognition, rhetorical agency, and belonging, particularly in STEM contexts. Megan’s impact extends through faculty development, graduate instructor mentoring, and nationally recognized scholarship on writing pedagogy.

Casey Self
Teaching Professor
Department of Biology

Casey’s evidence‑based, growth‑oriented teaching practices emphasize reflection and learning as an iterative process. She creates highly structured, learner‑driven classrooms focused on the “why” behind concepts and empowers student inquiry. Her impact extends beyond the classroom through extensive service, including chairing the Faculty Council on Teaching and Learning and advancing University‑wide teaching effectiveness.

Megan and Casey were recently featured in a Perspectives Newsletter article about use of AI in the UW classroom.

Excellence in Teaching Award

Rachael Herren
Graduate Student
Theatre History and Performance Studies
School of Drama

Rachael’s theater classrooms are supportive spaces for rehearsing the complexity of adult life. She embraces practices such as “speaking in drafts” to encourage revision, risk‑taking, and confidence. She encourages undergraduate scholarship, and many of her students present their research at University and national conferences. And Rachael demonstrates exceptional teaching leadership across multiple instructional roles while mentoring new graduate instructors.

Jennifer Zheng
Graduate Student
Department of Communication

Jennifer has served in a variety of teaching roles, including instructor of record and lead teaching assistant for large‑enrollment courses. She supports undergraduate research, in addition to developing curriculum and training instructors in community‑based public speaking and debate programs. Jennifer’s reflective, experiential pedagogy connects theory to real‑world contexts to empower students’ confidence, critical thinking, and academic growth.

UWAA Distinguished Service Award

Gregg Blodgett
BA, SPANISH, ACCOUNTING, 1986

Since graduating from the UW in 1976, Gregg has been a long‑time alumni association volunteer and leader who served as UWAA president during a pivotal period of institutional growth and closer integration with the University. A trusted mentor to successive UWAA board leaders, Gregg’s guidance has strengthened alumni engagement and governance for nearly two decades.

Read more about Gregg on the UW Spanish & Portuguese Studies website.

UWAA Alumna Summa Laude Dignata

Mary Brunkow
BS, MOLECULAR & CELLULAR BIOLOGY, 1983

Mary, an internationally recognized scientist, is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology. She was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for co‑discovering the FOXP3 gene, a foundational breakthrough that has transformed understanding of regulatory T-cells and immune tolerance. Her work has advanced treatments for autoimmune disease, cancer, and transplant rejection, reflecting extraordinary global impact and lifelong commitment to scientific service.

Read more about Mary in University of Washington Magazine.