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Awards
2024 FASS Dean's Medals awarded to outstanding faculty for excellence in research, teaching, and service
Congratulations to professors Gerardo Otero, Lara Aknin, and Tamir Moustafa who have been awarded the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Dean's Medal in recognition of their academic excellence in research, teaching, and service.
Established in 1999, the FASS Dean's Medals are awarded annually to continuing faculty members who have demonstrated significant contributions to their field of research and service to their department while in position at FASS.
2024 Dean's Medallists
Lifetime Achievement Award
Gerardo Otero
International Studies
Gerardo Otero is professor and graduate chair in the School for International Studies and an associate member of the Labour Studies Program. A Royal Society of Canada Fellow, Otero is also a founding member of the BC Employment Standards Coalition and a research associate at the BC Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. He formerly served as president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Otero is a leading scholar in economic change, political sociology, and the sociology of food and agriculture. His research serves as a model for measuring development and evaluating its impacts on food systems and urban and rural well-being. He has published more than 100 scholarly articles, chapters and books. His books include Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico (1999), Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America (2008), The Neoliberal Diet: Health Profits, Unhealthy People (2018), and Collective Empowerment in Latin America: Indigenous Peasant Struggles and Political Transformation (2024, with Efe Can Gürcan).
Otero's service contributions to FASS throughout his 34 years at SFU has been substantial. He served as director of the Latin American Studies Program in the early to mid 2000s, serving also as its graduate and undergraduate chair. At International Studies, he has served as graduate chair for five years, volunteered for multiple tenure and promotion committees, hiring committees, and contributed to collaborative departmental initiatives, including coordination of the International Studies Research Colloquium series for several years.
Lara Aknin
Psychology
A Distinguished Professor of social psychology and director of the Helping and Happiness Lab, Lara Aknin's research focuses on the study of what makes people happy, the emotional consequences of kind or generous behavior, and the well-being outcomes of specific spending choices. More recently, she is looking at the impact of pandemic policy decisions on mental health in various populations. Aknin's research is frequently covered by top media outlets around the world and her contributions to scientific communication earned her the SFU Emerging Thought Leaders Newsmaker Award.
Recognized as a leading researcher in mental health and emotional well-being, Aknin has been appointed to several prestigious research positions, including editor of the United Nation's World Happiness Report and chair of The Lancet’s COVID-19 Mental Health Task Force. She was also requested to deliver the keynote address at a national conference at the invitation of the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia.
Aknin was awarded the President’s New Researcher Award from the Canadian Psychological Association, the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Sage Young Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for exceptional contributions to psychological science. She was recently elected as a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology and a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for her longstanding contributions to the field of social psychology.
Tamir Moustafa
International Studies
Tamir Moustafa is professor and Stephen Jarislowsky Chair in the School for International Studies. His research interests include comparative judicial politics, religion and politics, authoritarianism, the politics of the Middle East and, more recently, the politics of knowledge production. Moustafa’s first major project focused on the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court, and the politics of courts in authoritarian regimes more generally. This culminated in The Struggle for Constitutional Power: Law, Politics, and Economic Development in Egypt (2007) and Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (2008, with Tom Ginsburg).
His more recent work explored the public debates generated by dual constitutional commitments to Islamic law and liberal rights in Egypt and Malaysia. His book Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State (2018) was shortlisted for the prestigious Socio-Legal Studies Association Book Prize, and was recognized by the Asian Law and Society Association. His current work is focused on how the U.S. National Science Foundation shaped the discipline of political science in the second half of the 20th century.
His research achievements have been recognized and supported through visiting fellowships at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and Harvard Law School.