Professor Pinto Receives Graduate Student Mentoring Award
Associate Professor Rogério Meireles Pinto has captured this year’s Graduate Student Mentoring Awards for faculty teaching in a doctoral program offered by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in cooperation with Columbia University’s professional schools.
His is one of two annual awards offered by the Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC) to honor faculty who exemplify the ideals of Ph.D. mentoring. Graduate students from GSAS and affiliated schools make the selections. This year, they had to choose from over fifty compelling nomination letters, spanning all disciplines. The other award, for a faculty member in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, went to Carol Gluck, George Samsan Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Language and Cultures.
A Brazilian-born psychiatric social worker, Professor Pinto does research on evidence-based models of effective community-researcher partnerships. He received this teaching honor because of the nomination letters sent by CUSSW doctoral students commending him for going “above and beyond” a professor’s responsibility to answer questions, inspiring students through his “commitment to social justice and to fostering collaboration,” prioritizing mentoring relationships, and working in partnership with students to “generate outcomes.” He said he was “very humbled” upon receipt of GSAC’s notification letter.
“We applaud Associate Professor Pinto and thank his students for the acknowledgment he will receive,” said Dean Jeanette Takamura, noting that he is the third CUSSW faculty member to receive this award in the past eight years, the other two being Professor Irwin Garfinkel and Associate Professor Julien Teitler. Recalling the Greek proverb “A society grows great when old men (and women) plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit,” she went on to elaborate on the value placed by the School’s faculty on mentoring their students:
For a comparatively small school to so often win such recognition for mentoring is a testament to the level of commitment of our entire faculty to planting trees, nurturing them, and watching them grow, reaching always upward to help bring science, critical thinking, and the voices of the community to efforts to prevent risks and the alleviate suffering.
The Faculty Mentoring Awards will be presented at this year’s Ph.D. Convocation, which will be held on Sunday May 19th.
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