Convocation Speaker- Stephen Mackessy
M. LUCILE HARRISON AWARD
The M. Lucile Harrison Award recognizes professional excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Awarded annually by the Office of the Provost, this award reflects a lifetime of achievement, and recipients are recognized as outstanding teachers and respected scholars who have been active in service to the university and their profession. It is these accomplishments that marked the career of M. Lucile Harrison, a professor emerita of elementary education, a coauthor of a national reading series and an award-winning educator.
M. Lucile Harrison 2012 Award winner: Stephen P. Mackessy
Stephen Mackessy, professor of Biological Sciences, has been named winner of this year's M. Lucile Harrison Award, the university's top faculty honor. Mackessy earned his bachelor's
and master's degrees in biology from the University of California Santa Barbara, and received his Ph.D. in zoology with a biochemistry minor from Washington State University in 1989. He joined UNC's School of Biological Sciences in 1989 and attained his current rank of professor in 2001.
He teaches at all levels of the school's curriculum from freshman-level biology courses to graduate-level biomedical science.
During his 21 years at UNC, he's involved nearly 50 undergraduate students in his research, which focuses on how compounds in snake venom can be used in cancerfighting drugs, and has mentored 18 graduate students.