George Mason University’s Charlotte Gill and Jeff Offutt have been named winners of the 2019 Outstanding Faculty Awards by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).
The Outstanding Faculty Awards are the commonwealth's highest honor for faculty at Virginia's public and private colleges and universities. These awards recognize superior accomplishments in teaching, research and public service.
“We are delighted that Mason continues to be recognized for our incredibly talented faculty members and these two professors are clearly all-stars -- gifted researchers, exceptional teachers and mentors, and leaders within their profession and at Mason,” said Kim Eby, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Development.
Gill is an assistant professor and deputy director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society. She received a Rising Star Award, which recognizes faculty with more than two, but less than six, complete years of full-time experience as a faculty member.
Gill joined Mason as a tenure-track faculty member in 2014 after three years as a postdoctoral fellow and senior research associate. She has written or coauthored 25 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, 12 technical reports and nine practitioner-oriented translational pieces.
In 2017, Gill was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She also received the Academy of Experimental Criminology’s Young Experimental Scholar Award in 2012. She has been awarded four federal grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, including a $3.8 million research grant from the National Institute of Justice’s Comprehensive School Safety Initiative.
A leader in the field of criminology, Gill’s work combines high-impact practices in undergraduate education; a focus on community impact at the university, regional and national levels; and translational research. She collaborates with police departments, communities and the government to translate her research into practice and support the development of evidence-based policy.
Through her work, she prepares Mason students to be the next generation of criminal justice researchers, policymakers and practitioners.
Offutt, an Outstanding Faculty Award winner, is a computer science professor who has been teaching for almost 30 years, including 26 at George Mason. He wrote the first version of the university’s “Responsible Use of Computing” policy.
He received Mason’s Teaching Excellence Award, Teaching with Technology, in 2013. He also received a three-year, $900,000 grant from Google to re-design how introductory computer programming classes are taught. He and co-author Paul Ammann wrote the most widely used textbook in software testing, and his course materials are given freely and used around the world.
He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed research papers. His 1999 paper, “Generating Tests from UML Specifications,” created a new area in software testing—model-based testing—that is used at thousands of software companies.
Offutt is editor-in-chief of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, a Wiley journal that aims to “publish high-quality papers that help researchers, educators and practitioners understand cutting-edge results,” according to the journal website.
He is director of Mason’s master’s program in software engineering. He has mentored 18 PhD students, including 11 women in a field where fewer than 8 percent of all doctoral holders are female.
Outstanding Faculty Award nominees are selected by their institutions, reviewed by a panel of peers and chosen by a committee of leaders from the public and private sectors. SCHEV received 86 nominations this year. From that pool, 27 finalists were named and 13 award winners were chosen.
Jill Mitchell, an associate professor of accounting at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) who is also an adjunct instructor at Mason, was also named an Outstanding Faculty Award winner.
Winners will be honored at a luncheon March 7 at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond.
Jeff Offutt (from left), Charlotte Gill, Jill Mitchell and S. David Wu at the SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Awards ceremony in March. Photo provided.