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Cormack Teaching Awards
The Cormack Awards were established by former Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Dean Lesley Cormack in 2010 to celebrate excellence and innovation in teaching within the faculty. The award recognizes the passion that faculty members bring to the classroom, their quality of pedagogy, and the value they bring to their students’ education and the FASS teaching community.
The FASS Dean presents up to six Cormack Teaching Awards annually, one for each rank in the teaching stream (lecturer, senior lecturer, and university lecturer) and one for each rank of the research stream (assistant, associate, and full professor).
2025 award winners
Clare McGovern
Political Science
Clare McGovern is a Senior Lecturer in SFU's Department of Political Science, specializing in human rights law, Canadian politics and separatist movements. She completed a law degree from the University of Oxford before working for the UK National Audit Office. In that job, she reported to Parliament on programs in the British criminal justice system and peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. After moving to Canada, she completed her PhD in Political Science at UBC. Her research focuses on experiential teaching methods and the constitutionality of independence referendums.
David Cox
Psychology
An associate professor and a clinical psychologist, David Cox specializes in health psychology and human performance. He is a member of SFU Psychology's graduate training program in clinical psychology and has served as senior supervisor to over 40 graduate students. He co-authored a widely used university textbook, The Psychology of Health and Health Care: A Canadian Perspective, now in its sixth edition. Over the past 40 years, Cox has been actively involved in the McCreary Center Society in its advocacy research on adolescent health and has established himself as one of Canada’s leading sport and performance psychologists, working with athletes and teams at all levels, including multiple Olympic teams. He is currently the Chair of the Sports Medicine Council of British Columbia, a position he has held for almost three decades. In recognition of his contributions, he was inducted into the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 2021—the first psychologist in the province to receive this honour.
Eline de Rooij
Political Science
Eline de Rooij is a professor of Political Science at SFU. She holds a DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford. Her work focuses on how we can encourage people who don’t typically vote or participate in politics, like newcomers to Canada, to do so, thereby increasing their voice in politics. She studies how individuals become politically interested, knowledgeable and informed, and how political actors can mobilize individuals to be politically active. In her research, she also pays particular attention to the role of group identities and interactions with others in fostering political engagement. De Rooij enjoys teaching and mentoring students at all levels and on a range of subjects and research topics. She has taught a wide variety of courses, from the very first introductory course on politics and government, to upper-level seminars on topics such as identity politics, to graduate courses on research design and methods, including statistical and experimental methods.
Jason Brown
Global Humanities
Jason Brown was born and raised in Southern California and studied anthropology and international development as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. He has lived in Vancouver, BC since 2013 and became a Canadian citizen in 2024. He earned joint master’s degrees in forestry and theology from Yale. He completed his PhD in 2017 from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation research explored the sense of place and attachment to land of contemporary Catholic monks in the American West. The dissertation was published as Dwelling in the Wilderness: Modern Monks in the American West (2024). As a Lecturer at 91ÅÝܽ, Jason teaches courses in religious studies and ecological humanities for the Department of Global Humanities. Since 2023, he has piloted an ecological chaplaincy program at SFU which seeks to bring contemplative practice to build resilience to climate anxiety and ecological grief.
Kicya7 Joyce Schneider
Indigenous Studies
As an Úcwalmicw instructor of Indigenous pedagogies, Schneider’s research centers on facilitating respectful forms of engagement with knowledges from Nations not our own. She has designed a four protocols approach to doing this work in her teaching practice, and her students work with this framework as a means of reconciling their education on unceded Indigenous lands. She also leads workshops on making meaningful land acknowledgements and her latest publication argues that the gaps in transformative learning theory must be addressed through a local Indigenous knowledge(s)’ lens to reconcile the colonizing frames of reference informing post-secondary systems, policies, and practices.
Molly Cairncross
Psychology
Molly Cairncross is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Investigator at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and clinical psychologist. Her research aims to better understand risk and resilience factors associated with recovery from mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion. Using these insights, she aims to develop, test, and implement digital health interventions to support youth and their families after concussion. Her goal is to use digital platforms to connect youth and families with evidence-based knowledge and care that is accessible, cost effective, and informed by the needs of patients, families, and health care providers. Cairncross teaches courses on developmental psychopathology, child and adolescent assessment and treatment formulation, and biological bases of behaviour. Her teaching philosophy is grounded in the concept that learning occurs best when students are actively engaged, material is viewed as relevant to their lives, and instructors can evoke emotional or memorable learning experiences.
Past winners
2024: Janice Matsumura (History); Kathleen Millar (Sociology & Anthropology); Margaret Grant (Linguistics/Cognitive Science); Sabrina Higgins (Global Humanities/Archaeology); Sanjay Jeram (Political Science); Simon Woodcock (Economics)
2023: Amanda Watson (Sociology & Anthropology); Atiya Mahmood (Gerontology); Coleman Nye (Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies); John-Henry Harter (History/Labour Studies); Tamara O'Doherty (Criminology)
: Heather Bliss (Linguistics); Suzanna Crage (Sociology & Anthropology); Nicolas Kenny (History); Martin Santamaria (Economics); Rylan Simpson (Criminology); Luke Clossey (History)
: Steven Wright (Psychology); Matthew Hussey (English); Emily O'Brien (History/Global Humanities); Henny Yeung (Linguistics); Yuthika Girme (Psychology); Matthew Sigal (Psychology); Isobel Mayo-Harp (World Languages and Literatures)
2019: (Criminology); (Philosophy); (Linguistics); (Linguistics/Indigenous Languages Program)
2018: Tina Adcock, Assistant Professor (History); Douglas Allen, Professor (Economics); Leith Davis, Professor (English); Dai Heide, Senior Lecturer (Philosophy); Steve Weldon, Associate Professor (Political Science)
2017: Rebecca Cobb (Psychology); Ashley Farris-Trimble (Linguistics)
2016: Lara Aknin (Psychology); Gregory Dow (Economics); Sarah Walshaw (History); Richard Wright (Psychology)
2015: Elise Chenier (History); Alex Moens (Political Science); Bidisha Ray (History); Aaron Windel (History)
2014: David Coley (English); Sheri Fabian (Criminology); Jack Martin (Psychology); Roxanne Panchasi (History)
2013: Jeremy Brown (History); Mike Everton (English); Neil Watson (Psychology)
2012: John Bogardus (Sociology & Anthropology); John Harriss (International Studies); Nicole Jackson (International Studies); Kate Slaney (Psychology)
2011: Alison Ayers (Sociology & Anthropology/ Political Science); Dave Cox (Economics); Alec Dawson (History/Latin American Studies)
2010: Lara Campbell (Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies); Nicky Didicher (English); Yue Wang (Linguistics)