Meet this year's recipients of the Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence

“George Mason University faculty are at the forefront of their fields and their work is an overarching reason why Mason is considered one of the country’s top 50 public universities,” Mason President Gregory Washington said. “We take great pride in honoring our faculty for their transcendent work and impact in teaching, research, social impact, and diversity and inclusion here at the largest public research university in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” 

View all 13 faculty recipients of the 2024 Presidential Awards for Faculty Excellence.  

Faculty Excellence in Teaching

Dominic White
Instructional Assistant Professor, Computational Data Sciences

Dominic White received his PhD in 2016 from George Washington University and is an instructional assistant professor in the Department of Computational Data Sciences in the College of Science (COS). A computational paleontologist, White joined the faculty in 2019 and serves as the course coordinator for CDS 101 and 102, Introduction to Computational and Data Sciences, which is a Mason Core course in the Natural Sciences at Mason. As course coordinator, he leads and supports a team of fifteen faculty and Teaching Assistants (TAs) who teach the course.

White has led a number of successful pedagogical experiments that have changed his approach to the introductory course. In particular, he has taken advantage of the capabilities of online learning platforms to make the course more interactive, combining short lecture videos, quizzes, and scaffolded programming exercises to encourage student engagement. Students have responded well to his approach. They have given the course consistently excellent evaluations and have routinely recognized him through the Stearns Center’s “Thank-a-Teacher” program. The enrollments for the course have tripled in the four years White has been teaching it. He also developed an innovative new course, CDS 490, in which undergraduate students worked with the US Census Bureau on semester-long projects using census data, which they then presented at a Census Bureau conference.

The Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research

Rainald Löhner
Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Director, Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics

Rainald Löhner is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Science (COS) and is the Director of the Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). His research is in fluid dynamics, and he has been a pioneer in developing computational models for solving fluid flow problems. His algorithms and techniques have been applied to solve a wide variety of urgent problems, including air and underwater explosions, ship and submarine hydrodynamics, hemodynamics of vascular diseases, contaminant and pathogen transport, and even pedestrian movement and crowd control. Löhner’s recent efforts to apply his work in computational fluid dynamics to the problem of Covid-19 transport received national attention from major media outlets.

Löhner has been a prolific researcher and has published nearly 900 research publications, including nearly 200 peer-reviewed articles in journals from a variety of disciplines, ranging from the Journal of Computational Physics and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids to Engineering with Computers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Medical Imaging. He is also the author of a textbook on Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics. Löhner has given over 150 invited talks, many of them abroad, and serves on the editorial board of six international journals. He has secured grants in excess of $20 million dollars from several major organizations, including NASA, NSF, the National Institute of Health (NIH), NSF, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR).

In recognition of his research achievements, Löhner has received prestigious awards and has been named a Fellow of the International Association of Computational Mechanics. In 2023, he was recognized by Stanford University as one of the world's top 2% of scientists. Löhner has been active as a mentor, both to graduate students and colleagues. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to have successful academic careers, including several at Mason.

Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion

Kelly L. Knight 
Instructional Associate Professor, Forensic Science

Kelly Knight joined the Department of Forensic Science in 2013 as an instructional associate professor in the College of Science (COS). Prior to Mason, she worked professionally as a forensic scientist—first as a research associate and laboratory manager, and then as a forensic DNA analyst for several years with the Maryland State Police’s Forensic Sciences Division. Knight received the University’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2020 and she is the principal investigator of the forensic DNA laboratory.

Throughout Knight’s time at Mason she has played key roles in a number of initiatives to advance the cause of diversity and inclusivity in STEM education. In 2019 she led the effort to create the first forensic DNA laboratory on campus, in part based on the goal of providing the kind of hands-on learning that often helps to erase gender and ethnic gaps in STEM degree achievement. In 2021 she participated in a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded 8-week course called "The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project." Following that experience she and two other Mason faculty members completed the facilitator workshop training necessary to lead a group of Mason STEM faculty through the same course. Knight has served on numerous DEI-related committees on and off campus and serves at the faculty advisor for several student groups, including the Women of Color in STEM (WOCSTEM).

Knight has also provided significant leadership in outreach efforts. Over a decade ago Professor Knight co-founded the Females of Color and those Underrepresented in STEM (FOCUS) middle school camp and the FOCUS High School Academy. Based on these and other achievements, Knight became a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2020 and was selected to give the keynote speech at the American Academy of Forensic Science (AAFS) Diversity Forum annual conference.