Four Saint Mary’s Faculty Receive Honors

On May 11, President Katie Conboy and Vice President and Provost Megan Zwart honored four members for a variety of awards and recognitions at the 2026 President’s Reception. 

Trish Keresztes, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Nursing Science
Donald R. and Nora Barry Fischer ’73 Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence 

The Donald R. and Nora Barry Fischer ’73 Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence celebrates professors who instill a deepened understanding of the field by stimulating intellectual scholarship and encouraging creative thinking.

For more than two decades, Trish Keresztes has taught with extraordinary consistency, energy, and heart. Known for warmth, humor, and steady positivity, she creates an environment where students feel both challenged and supported, and has a gift for making complex ideas understandable, building students’ confidence, and holding them to high standards while helping them believe they can succeed. With genuine enthusiasm and an encouraging presence, Keresztes fosters a learning environment that is both rigorous and supportive, inviting students to engage fully and grow.

Keresztes’ influence extends well beyond the classroom. Over the years, she has served on almost every College committee, helped create new degree programs, taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and held leadership roles. 

Mark Abram-Copenhaver, Department of Theatre
Kevin J. and Marijo Rogers Kelly ’77 Faculty Service Award

The Kevin J. and Marijo Rogers Kelly ’77 Faculty Service Award recognizes a faculty member who demonstrates exceptional commitment to local, regional, national, or international service to an academic field. This year’s honoree, Mark Abram-Copenhaver, personifies these attributes. 

Mark Abram-Copenhaver has served the Saint Mary’s community in numerous capacities including division director for Performing Arts and Communication Studies. He has also directed 23 productions at the College, including Red Herring, Legally Blonde, Henry V, Chicago, and She Kills Monsters. 

Abram-Copenhaver ensures that students, the College, and South Bend have multiple ways to fall in love with theatre. Embracing inclusivity, many of the plays are large shows offering as many students as possible to be on or behind stage. Legally Blonde, for example, involved 10% of the student body. 

Even when it seems as if the show can’t go on, this Abram-Copenhaver always ensures it will. In Fall 2020, hosting a large event indoors was unthinkable because of the pandemic, so he took the cast, crew, and orchestra outside in a roaming adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Despite the temperamental Indiana weather, the show did go on, if only a few days later. For over 20 years, Mark Abram-Copenhaver has given the campus laughter, tears, and thrills. 

His generous spirit has not been limited to the stage. He and his wife are always the first to stretch out a hand. Finding a home as big as their hearts was essential for them, making sure they could provide a place for friends and struggling artists to gather. They regularly host students at holiday dinners when going home isn’t an option. If someone is in need, he will always find a way to help because to not is simply unthinkable. 

Julie Voor, Professional Specialist/Clinical Instructor, Speech Language Pathology 
Carmi and Chris Murphy Award for Student Mentorship

The Carmi and Chris Murphy Faculty Award for Student Mentorship honors a faculty member whose guidance during the senior comprehensive leaves a lasting mark on students’ intellectual and professional growth. This year’s honoree embodies that mission with extraordinary care, skill, and generosity.

For Julie Voor, mentorship is not simply about helping students complete a requirement. It is about helping them become clinicians. Through her work with students in SLP 485, the undergraduate clinical rotation in the Judd Leighton Speech and Language Clinic, she leads students through a meaningful experiential learning process that bridges classroom knowledge and clinical practice. In this setting, students are challenged to apply what they have learned in real interactions with clients while developing the habits of mind, responsibility, and reflection essential to professional practice.

Voor meets students at a pivotal point in their development and provides the steady guidance, thoughtful feedback, and high expectations that allow them to grow in both confidence and competence. She helps them learn not only how to carry out clinical tasks, but how to think critically, respond compassionately, and conduct themselves with professionalism and dignity.

Her students benefit from the wisdom of an accomplished clinician and the encouragement of a gifted teacher. She creates the kind of mentoring relationship that is both supportive and transformative—one that helps students rise to the demands of clinical work while also seeing what they are capable of becoming. Voor’s impact extends well beyond the senior comprehensive, shaping the professional identities students carry into graduate study and into the field of speech-language pathology.

Those who know Julie Voor speak not only of her expertise, but of her generosity, her consistency, and her unwavering belief in her students. She represents the very best of faculty mentorship: guiding with excellence, challenging with care, and investing in the next generation with purpose and heart.

Andrew Pierce, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy
Karen Bush Schneider Faculty Scholarship Award

This Karen Bush Schneider Faculty Scholarship Award recipient has a body of work that one colleague characterized as “admirable for a full professor at any R-1 university,” in their field, with dozens of presentations, invited lectures, peer-reviewed publications, and two monographs.

Too often in academia, though, we celebrate the quantity of a scholar’s productivity and not the quality of their work. In Andrew Pierce’s case, the quality of their research is as impressive as the quantity. Integrating both interdisciplinary breadth and disciplinary rigor with wisdom gleaned from their classroom teaching experiences and more traditional academic sources, his work has advanced our understanding of critical contemporary issues such as collective identity, restorative justice, structural racism, and white privilege.

Pierce’s scholarship also helps make Saint Mary’s a better partner to organizations in the local community and beyond. He has published and presented on community engagement and the pedagogies of community engagement. And last year, Pierce earned the Community-Engaged Alliance Brian Douglas Hiltunen Faculty Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Scholarship of Engagement.

These are only a handful of his achievements, but they demonstrate why Andrew Pierce is eminently qualified for this award. We honor this outstanding candidate, whose ongoing work in social and political philosophy and pedagogies of community engagement advances his field and the mission of Saint Mary's College. 

May 22, 2026