Four honored with President’s Awards for Diversity

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Four individuals received the 2008 UAB President’s Awards for Diversity during a public ceremony to recognize the importance of institutional diversity and honor those who nurture diversity on campus and elsewhere.

Mona Fouad, M.D., winner of the President’s Diversity Faculty Award, has supported diversity through health, education and leadership.

Fouad directs the UAB Minority Health and Research Center, a powerful and valuable resource for securing grant funding, recruiting participants for clinical trials and studies, collaborating on projects and programs that reach across institutional boundaries. She also is deeply committed to developing the next generation of minority physicians, health-care workers and scientists.

Cynthia Scott, UAB director of minority student recruitment and retention, is the winner of the President’s Diversity Staff Award.

Scott joined UAB as a freshman and never left. Her work is the recruitment and retention of African-American students to her alma mater. She also established a mentoring program for minority scholarship students, and she encourages and supports their progress.

Kajal Buckoreelall, pharmacology and toxicology doctoral student, is the winner of the President’s Graduate Student Diversity Award.

As chair of the International Expo, she planned, organized and led an event that introduced and educated 1,000 people about cultures different from their own.

Buckoreelall was the driving force behind the Tunnel of Oppression project at UAB. She brought several student organizations together to present the in-your-face experiential diversity activity.

Edina Mwangi, a senior economics major, is the winner of President’s Undergraduate Student Diversity Award.

She is a member of the Undergraduate Student Government Association Stars Committee, which promotes higher education throughout Alabama. She chairs UAB’s Interculture Committee and took a special leadership role in the Invisible Children event, which included the screening of a documentary about Ugandan children brainwashed into becoming guerilla soldiers.