The fifth in a series of personal notes focusing on gratitude.
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May 7, 2025
Exceptional Faculty Awards Committee
Everett Community College
Dear Committee Members:
We nominate Dr. Hilary Kemp for the exceptional faculty award because of her superlative efforts as a member of the Life Sciences faculty for the past eleven years.
Dr. Hilary Kemp demonstrates exceptional achievement in all aspects of her work. She is a fantastic colleague, always ready to find time to work collaboratively on course improvements and looking to find common ground with other faculty and staff members. She is innovative and flexible in the ways she works with students, offering different course modalities and using zoom and other tools to connect with her online students. Her efforts have led to new ways of teaching high-demand pre-nursing courses, such as in the creation of hybrid weekend microbiology courses that have been extremely popular with students. In recent years she has even done admirable K-12 outreach work, extending EvCC’s influence into the Snohomish County community.
Dr. Kemp’s ability to innovate and work well with others was demonstrated most dramatically when we experienced the campus shutdown due to COVID19. The microbiology faculty were faced with the difficult problem of teaching a laboratory science that normally involves the use of materials, such as live bacteria and growth media, that were not easily available or safe for students to have in their homes. Dr. Kemp led the team in revamping the laboratory activities, finding high-quality online resources and developing some safe activities using baker’s yeast that students could do at home. She worked with our lab coordinator, Thu Nguyen, to create a kit put together by a local supplier that students could purchase for their at-home labs. It is also worth mentioning that microbiology uses a lot of materials and technician time and Dr. Kemp is consistently respectful of that when she works with our lab technicians. In a somewhat similar vein, when our lab coordinator (Thu Nguyen) recently lost her father, it was Dr. Kemp who organized a sympathetic response from the biology faculty, thus ensuring that her loss would be appropriately acknowledged.
While Dr. Kemp has appropriately focused much of her attention on the construction and revision of curricula in microbiology and cell biology, she has made important contributions beyond her own subject areas. One remarkable example occurred at a pre-fall faculty meeting where department members were engaged in a protracted and difficult discussion about whether the various sections of Biology 232 (Human Physiology) should have a common lab manual, as was already the case for Biology 211 (Cell Biology). Amidst much heated conversation about the varying classroom experiences of students and the intellectual freedom of faculty, Dr. Kemp quietly and patiently followed the agonizing back-and-forth dialogue before proposing a brilliant compromise: if we couldn’t agree to have a common student-facing manual, we could at least have a common faculty-facing manual, which would ensure some level of coordination that would be helpful for the onboarding of new faculty and the coordination of lab setups by support staff. This compromise was agreed upon and adopted.
We want to conclude with some examples that, while well beyond our normal scope of work, highlight just how generous and fun Dr. Kemp can be as a collaborator and EvCC ambassador. One of us (GC) has used biology-themed music to enliven classroom lectures and conference presentations. In Dr. Kemp he has found a highly capable co-conspirator for these musical interludes, one of which (A Blaze of Glory, about the immune system) was featured on EvCC’s YouTube channel and in its 2020 annual report and another of which paid tribute to our former dean, the late Al Friedman. Dr. Kemp has recently brought music into her own K-12 outreach projects, devising a version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” that teaches kindergarteners about the bones of the human body in an age-appropriate way to supplement other hands-on activities with these prospective future Trojans. Her use of existing biology department models and resources to engage these young learners is the kind of community outreach that most of us support in principle but few of us actually do in practice. We can imagine that, with the support provided by this award, Dr. Kemp might be able to expand her current outreach efforts, for example, by synergizing with those of the Science & Engineering Student Exhibition (SESE), an annual June event at EvCC that includes visits from local elementary schools.
To get us through these challenging times, we need a work environment that gives us joy and a sense of shared effort. Dr. Kemp remains a steadfast source of collegiality and friendship, and is well-deserving of the title of “exceptional faculty.”
Sincerely,
Greg Crowther, PhD
and
Rene Fester, PhD
Department of Life Sciences
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