Office of the Provost
Office of the Provost
Interim Provost Soyica Colbert stands in front of a podium in the Bioethics Library. Next to her is a projector board with a powerpoint slide that reads
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The Office of the Provost Celebrates Faculty Excellence at 2025 Provost’s Awards Ceremony

On November 6, 2025, the Office of the Provost convened faculty, administrators and guests for its annual Provost’s Awards ceremony. The event honored faculty members whose scholarship, innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration advance Georgetown’s mission of teaching, research and service.

Magis Prize

The Office of the Provost awarded three associate professors who are tackling pressing societal questions with the Magis Prize: $100,000 in funding to accelerate their work. This year’s winners are Ian Lyons, associate professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences studying math’s impact on the brain; Blythe Shepard, an associate professor in the School of Health’s Department of Human Science examining one of the most common understudied proteins; and Andrew Zeitlin, an associate professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy working to improve learning outcomes in Rwanda.

Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award

The Office of the Provost awarded the 2025 Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award to Professor Paul Ohm (Law) and Associate Professor Meg Leta Jones (Communication, Culture & Technology) for their work on the Technology Impact Lab. Associate Professor Katherine Chandler (SFS) and Associate Professor Rajesh Veeraraghavan (SFS) received the innovation award for their work on the Centennial Lab, Public Interest Technology: Senegal. The awards include monetary prizes made possible through a gift from the Bill (B’92) and Karen Sonneborn Innovation Fund. 

Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professors

Every year since 2016, deans, departments, and similar units nominate deserving colleagues as Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professors to honor Associate Professors who are performing at extraordinary high levels. Their work exemplifies what makes Georgetown strong – faculty thoroughly engaged in pushing the envelope of knowledge in their field, and transmitting their passion for such work to their students and the general public. 

The 2025 Distinguished Associate Professors are Michael Amezcua, Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Sciences; Shaun Brinsmade, Associate Professor, Department of Biology, College of Arts & Sciences; Janet (Ruoran) Gao, Associate Professor, Department of Finance, McDonough School of Business; Qiwei (Britt) He, Associate Professor, Data Science and Analytics Program, College of Arts & Sciences.

Career Research Achievement Award

The Office of the Provost awarded the 2025 Career Research Achievement Award to Distinguished University Professor John McNeill. The author of eight books and approximately 160 articles, and the editor or co-editor of 18 volumes, McNeill is an influential and internationally recognized environmental historian. A past president of the American Historical Association, he is one of the world’s leading scholars of the past, with nearly 30,000 citations. By drawing on the sources and methods of a remarkable range of academic disciplines, from culicidology to climatology, he has developed and popularized fundamental concepts in the study of environments past and present, including the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration. He has won many of the most prestigious fellowships and honors in his fields of study, delivered numerous keynote addresses, and worked to communicate his ideas in newspaper columns and interviews to large, international audiences.

Distinguished Achievement in Research Award

The Office of the Provost awarded the 2025 Distinguished Achievement in Research Award to Jeremy Fineman, Professor and Wagner Chair in Computer Science, for his award-winning paper on shortest path algorithms for real-weighted graphs. Examples of real weighted graphs include road networks and communication networks. His paper, Single-Source Shortest Paths with Negative Real Weights in Õ(mn8/9) Time, won the best-paper award at the 2024 ACM Symposium of the Theory of Computing. Prior to this paper, the most efficient algorithm for finding shortest paths in real-weighted graphs was developed in the 1950s. His groundbreaking approach uses randomization to find shortest paths, spawning a new line of research on significantly more efficient algorithms.

The Office of the Provost awarded the 2025 Distinguished Achievement in Research Award to Toshihiro Higuchi, Associate Professor of History, for his work on worldwide radioactive contamination resulting from nuclear weapons testing after World War II as one of the first truly global, human-driven environmental crises in history, whose successful mitigation through the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty offers valuable lessons for addressing today’s climate crisis and other complex environmental challenges. Higuchi’s book, Political Fallout, received the 2021 Michael H. Hunt Prize for the best book published in international or global history from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His book has received wide acclaim, including a special roundtable of reviews from leading scholars on the H-Diplo network for diplomatic historians and international relations scholars.