A ceremony and reception honoring the winners of the 2010 George Mason University Teaching Excellence Awards was held on April 12 in the Center for the Arts lobby. The awards program is directed by the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Environmental Science and Policy Associate Professor Dann Sklarew was among the winners this year.  Dr. Sklarew is associate director of the Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center and co-director of the sustainability studies minor program. His teaching career started at Mason in 1993. He served as an adjunct instructor for biology and what is now the Honors Program in General Education. He gave one of the first lectures anywhere on the [still text-based] World Wide Web in 1993, the first web-based presentation on the role and impact of computers on the environment in 1994, and he first offered supplemental service learning credit to his Ecology, Technology and Choice students in 1994-95. After a decade hiatus, mostly spent leading a successful UN project to train water resource managers, Sklarew returned to Mason in fall 2008. Recently, he created and teaches Mason’s first distance education section of Fundamentals of Ecology; co-wrote Mason’s first Climate Action Plan, facilitated a regional alliance of environmental educators; and launched and co-led a NOAA-supported partnership to enhance watershed understanding and stewardship among roughly 10,000 local middle school students each year. Sklarew also serves as faculty adviser for 10 ESP graduate students.