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Winners of the 2009 Thomas W. Schmitt Annual Staff Prize
June 2, 2009
 At this year's Staff Service Award Ceremony, Caltech honored 234 staff members for service ranging from 10 to 45 years, and Tom Dunn and Sheila Shull were announced as the winners of the 2009 Thomas W. Schmitt Annual Staff Prize. The award recognizes staff members "whose contributions embody the values and spirit that enable the Institute to achieve excellence in research and education."
Tom Dunn has been at Caltech since 1973 and is the head of the electronics shop in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. A great many faculty, students, postdocs, and staff—current and former—evidently admire and respect Tom, since no fewer than 90 of them submitted words of praise for him. One wrote, "Tom maintains a wonderful 'can-do' attitude, and when you have occasion to call upon him, you find that he not only fixes the problem, you are in a better mood for having interacted with him."
Sheila Shull has been the department administrator in Applied and Computational Mathematics for almost 30 years. When she first came to ACM (then known as AMa), the option was in some organizational disarray, and Sheila is credited with getting the department in order with incredible speed and skill. Sheila takes care of almost every aspect of the day-to-day activities in ACM, including proposal submission and grant management; management of staff members, visitors, and students; organization of international conferences; recruitment of students and instructors; utilization of space; and, most importantly, "care and feeding" of the ACM faculty, which is not without its challenges. The entire option feels very privileged to have someone of her caliber working for ACM and for Caltech.
Tom and Sheila each received a cash award of $3,000, as well as a personal gift of recognition. For more information on the winners and the prize, click here.
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