Two University of Michigan faculty members and an advocacy group will be honored next month with awards for their efforts to support women, diversity and equity.
U-M’s Academic Women’s Caucus has awarded its 2025 Sarah Goddard Power Award to Laura Balzano, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the College of Engineering, and associate professor of statistics in LSA, for her significant contributions to the betterment of women.
MORE INFORMATION
The Center for the Education of Women+ administers the awards for AWC.
CEW+’s Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change will be presented at the ceremony as well.
One U-M advocacy group and an individual will receive awards. Girls Who Code will receive the group award, and Margo Schlanger, the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law and professor of law in the Law School, will receive the individual award.
All the awards will be presented from 3-5 p.m. Feb. 13 in the Michigan League’s Hussey Room.
Sarah Goddard Power Award
Named after the late regent Sarah Goddard Power, the award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the betterment of women through their leadership, scholarship or other ways in their professional life.
In addition to teaching and research roles, Balzano has served on the Electrical and Computer Engineering Committee for an Inclusive Department, where she spearheaded the creation of a division Code of Conduct, which was adopted by the faculty in spring 2023.
She is the only woman on the ECE Executive Committee, a committee that represents the department in major decisions and is filled through a divisionwide vote. In all her service roles, she is a strong advocate for women and underrepresented electrical engineers and mathematicians.
Balzano teaches Digital Signal Processing, Function Space Methods, Estimation and Detection, and Machine Learning, along with special topics courses.
She has developed diversity-promoting modules for classes, including short technical videos from underrepresented minority engineers, a machine-learning ethics lecture about race and gender bias in machine-learning algorithms, as well as a history lesson discussing well-known statisticians who studied or supported eugenics.
She also has presented on machine learning to high school students with Wolverine Pathways, AI 4 All, and Engineering OnRamp.
Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award
In honor of former director Carol Hollenshead’s 20-year tenure at the Center for the Education of Women, CEW+ created the Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change.
Awardees are faculty, staff and students — either an individual or a group — whose sustained efforts have resulted in greater equity with regard to gender, race, class, age, disability, gender identity or sexual orientation.
The two winners will present talks at the awards ceremony Feb. 13.
Girls Who Code was founded by current doctoral students in Michigan Medicine’s Gilbert S. Omenn Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics.
The club seeks to provide a collaborative and supportive environment for high schoolers of all skill levels and backgrounds interested in learning how to code. It teaches computer programming skills to K-12 students through weekly club meetings and other outreach events.
Schlanger, the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law and professor of law in the Law School, teaches constitutional law, torts and classes relating to civil rights and prisons. She also founded and runs the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse and does substantial work in civil rights and prison and immigration reform.
Most recently, she worked as a senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leading USDA’s implementation of its Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, which in the summer of 2024 distributed $2 billion to more than 43,000 people who had experienced discrimination in USDA farm lending.
