2023 USC Mentoring Awards Recipients

The USC Mentoring Award honors faculty who contribute to an engaging, supportive, inclusive academic environment through their mentorship of students and faculty. This year, USC honored 18 mentors from across the university to highlight their dedication to sustained mentorship. These USC Mentoring Award recipients have invested their time to helping students and faculty advance their disciplines and beyond. We want to recognize what they have done and encourage others across the university to do the same. Fight On!
To see a complete list of all recipients, please click here.
USC Dornsife’s Helen Berman and Percival Everett Elected to National Academies
Helen Berman, professor (research) of quantitative and computational biology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Bridge Institute of the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Berman studies nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, and how proteins interact with them. She also studies collagen, a protein found throughout the body that provides structure and strength to muscles, bones and skin as well as the tissues that connect them. She says she’s driven to pursue her research by a love of learning and discovery, and she tries to foster that drive in others, as well. “In my work, I try to balance time between conducting my own research with ways of enabling scientific discovery by others.”
Percival Everett, Distinguished Professor of English at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Everett, whose research centers on American studies and critical theory, has authored 34 books as well as more than 70 shorter works including poems, essays and short stories. His writing has garnered numerous awards, including the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature for his novel Big Picture (Graywolf Press, 1996), the Pushcart Prize for his 1996 article “The Appropriation of Cultures,” and his first Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in 2001 for Erasure (UPNE, 2001).
Congratulations Professors Berman and Everett! Fight on!