Faculty Award for Excellence in Community-Engaged Teaching

This award recognizes a colleague for their commitment to community engagement through their teaching practice. This might entail a sustained commitment to offering service-learning courses or a particularly imaginative or impactful project. The faculty member will have demonstrated their ability to create meaningful community partnerships, ones which support the needs of local organizations and enrich the education of Loyola students through their contact and collaboration with Baltimore and the greater world.

Nominate a Faculty Member

Current Awardee

2026 - Margarita Gómez, teacher education

Margarita Gómez, Ph.D., Professor of Literacy Education at Loyola University Maryland, aims to better understand how students’ use of their full linguistic repertoire and classroom contexts play a critical role for culturally and linguistically diverse learners’ writing development. She also examines equity and assessment of multilingual students’ linguistic practices, and multilingual policy and practice. A former bilingual elementary teacher, she currently teaches courses in assessment and instruction of multilingual literacy development and language, literacy, and culture. Her scholarship has been published in premier academic journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, the Bilingual Research Journal, Elementary School Journal, the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. She is currently co-editor for the Writing Matters for the Language Arts Journal.

Past Awardee

2025 - Nina Guise-Gerrity, philosophy

Professor Nina Guise-Gerrity holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Philosophy, a Master’s in Great Books from St John’s, and a professional MBA from Loyola University. Her fields of study and teaching focus on Ancient Greek metaphysical and early 18th-20th century political philosophers. She inculcates service into her classes, aiming to seamlessly show that community engagements are an extension of the life of the mind.

2024 - Suzanne Keilson, engineering 

Dr. Keilson is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Loyola University Maryland. She has a BA degree in Physics from Yale University and M.S., M. Phil., and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Columbia University. Her master’s research involved materials science and point defects, while for her Ph.D. she studied electrical engineering, signal processing, and biomedical sensory systems. She came to Baltimore to a post-doctoral position at the neural encoding lab of the biomedical engineering program of Johns Hopkins. Her current research interests include design, assistive, and user centered engineering and engineering education.
Dr. Keilson loves to communicate the fun and excitement of all areas of science, math, engineering, and technology. Specifically related to this award, she has worked with a number of community partners to bring projects with a social and assistive technological impact into her classrooms, including Probability and Statistics, Systems Engineering, and Senior Design projects. She has especially enjoyed collaborating with Volunteers for Medical Engineering (VME)/ Image Center Maryland and the Bridges Baltimore tutoring group.