The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate announced last week that Assistant Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers will receive the Dr. Gerald R. Gill Professor of the Year Award at a reception on April 22.
The Senate's Education Committee oversaw an informal nomination process before selecting Sommers out of a pool of widely popular professors.
Sommers is a social psychologist whose research focuses on the influence of race-related norms on judgment, as well as the intersection of law and psychology.
"It's always great to win an award," Sommers said. "But this award would be particularly special in that first, it comes from the students that we actually teach and second, it's named in memory of a colleague that I have a great deal of respect and affection for."
The Senate has awarded the Professor of the Year Award annually since 1999. The body voted in fall 2007 to name it after its first recipient, Professor of History Gerald R. Gill, a renowned civil rights scholar who passed away in 2007.
"Even being mentioned in the same sentence as Professor Gill is a great honor," Sommers said.
As for reasons why he was chosen, Sommers directed attention away from himself, pointing to widespread interest in the topics he teaches and the fact that he teaches large classes.
The subject of social psychology provides many benefits to the teacher and allows them to be creative with topics, working popular culture examples into the class, according to Sommers.
"It really is a class about our daily culture," he said.
Race and how racial prejudices influence decision-making have become a large part of Sommers' research and teaching.
"I think race and diversity ... are incredibly important issues to talk about and examine scientifically in our daily lives even if we don't always do that on our own," Sommers said.
Sommers incorporates these topics into his Psychology and Law seminar.
That course covers the entire legal system "from start to finish," Sommers said. At each step, Sommers relates racial prejudices to the court process.
"It's definitely one of the things I focus on in my research," he said, adding that he plans to tie these issues into his Social Psychology class in the fall. "In that course, it's not the focus ... but for each topic we specifically tie race into it, which I think is important."
Sommers, who in 2002 received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, is currently teaching Experimental Psychology. Next semester, he will teach that course in addition to Social Psychology.
Senator Brandon Rattiner, who served as a co-chair of the Senate's Education Committee this academic year, called Sommers a "pretty obvious choice" for the award.
"We know that Professor Sommers is doing very exciting research that the student body and the administration [are] very proud of," Rattiner said. "Sommers is somebody that is the definition of what we want a teacher at Tufts to be. He's very accessible to students. He's energetic and engaging."
According to Rattiner, a junior who also intends to run for TCU president, his committee used TuftsLife.com and a question on this Senate's recent student survey in order to elicit nominations for the award.
Senators then selected faculty members for further review based on the quantity of nominations the faculty members received. They then narrowed down that pool to candidates who had not been previously selected for the award.
Sommers was selected based on the nature of his research and the type of comments and reviews received from students, Rattiner said.
Outgoing TCU President Duncan Pickard, a junior, praised Sommers.
"The award is given in recognition of service, dedication and excellence in education, and we just think that Professor Sommers embodies all of that," he said. "He's really dedicated to teaching and researching and everything that students really value in a professor."
The Senate will present the award at a reception in Hotung Café at 3:30 p.m. on April 22.
Tessa Gellerson contributed reporting to this article.
