Awards, People

Two honored with Faculty Service Awards

By Public Affairs

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Nancy Wallace, a professor of real estate at Berkeley Haas, and Ignacio Navarrete, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, are the winners of UC Berkeley’s prestigious 2019 Berkeley Faculty Service Award.

The award is bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate on one or two faculty a year “for their outstanding and dedicated service to the campus, and whose activities as a faculty member have significantly enhanced the quality of the campus as an educational institution and community of scholars.”

The award also recognizes senate service and honors contributions that have had “a lasting and significant impact on the excellence of the Berkeley campus.”

Nancy Wallace is the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets and Chair of the Real Estate Group at the Haas School of Business.

She is being honored for a “long history of outstanding service to committees of the Academic Senate and also in various important roles on behalf of the campus community at large,” reads her award citation. She worked on a “series of onerous financial issues,” including the budget of intercollegiate athletics and a funding model for the Lower Sproul Plaza redevelopment project.

In 2008, she was recruited by the Office of the President to serve on the Systemwide Committee on UC Faculty Mortgage Programs. She was also drafted to play a major role in the financial planning for Memorial Stadium.

“During the past 10 years, Nancy has devoted extraordinary time and energy to the campus’s day-to-day well-being,” wrote Anthony Long, chair of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Faculty Awards and an emeritus professor of classics and literature.

Professor Ignacio Navarrete is a “stellar and exemplary nominee” for the award and has “an outstanding record of Academic Senate service dating back to the mid 1990s, and has been especially active in dealing with issues of educational policy,” according to his citation.

He served on a panoply of committees, but one in particular stands out.

“No Senate committee is more important than Admissions, Enrollment, and Preparatory Education, and Ignacio has virtually made it his own,” his citation goes on. He’s worked on it since 2013, serving as chair since 2016.

Professor Kim Voss, who worked closely with him on the committee, tells this story:

“Ignacio became chair of the committee at a complicated and difficult moment. We were in the midst of an effort to reform Berkeley’s admission policies to make them fairer, a critical task given that competition for spots in the freshman class had grown to historic levels. Some of our reforms, notably our effort to give all applicants the opportunity to submit letters of recommendation, met with fierce resistance at the systemwide level. Ignacio dealt with the situation masterfully. His judgment was excellent and his diplomatic skills were matchless.”

Read more about the winners