Saint Michael's College

What Others Are Saying...

Listed below are some of Saint Michael’s many recognitions by unbiased, outside sources, through rankings, grants or awards. 

Saint Michael's was ranked 88th out of 650 nationally in Forbes magazine's "Americas Top Colleges" 2011 edition. Forbes describes their approach this way: "Our annual ranking of the 650 best undergraduate institutions focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt. Unlike other lists, we pointedly ignore ephemeral measures such as school 'reputation' and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending."

Saint Michael's appears in The Princeton Review's Best 376 Colleges 2012 edition and is called one of the country's best institutions for undergraduate education. Only about 15% of America's 2,500 four-year colleges and three colleges outside the U.S.A. are profiled in the book.

Saint Michael's is featured in the Fiske Guide to Colleges 2012. Fiske Guide to Colleges is the #1 bestselling college guide, from the top name in college admissions, featuring some 300 of the country’s best and most interesting colleges and universities. 

Saint Michael's appears in the 2011 edition of The Princeton Review's Best 376 Colleges guidebook.

Saint Michael's, after a three-year review, joined the elite group of 270 colleges nationwide with Phi Beta Kappa chapters, making Saint Michael's one of 20 national Catholic colleges with a chapter and one of four in New England (Saint Michael's, Holy Cross, Boston College and Fairfield).

Saint Michael's Art Historian Amy Werbel was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011 to China and is now teaching American Studies courses in a Chinese university with her family for a year. Professor Werbel earned her doctorate from Yale University. She is the author of Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (published by Yale University Press), which was chosen "Outstanding Academic Title" for 2008 by Choice Magazine.

Saint Michael's political science Professor Patricia Siplon was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011 and is now teaching for the year in the University of Jordan's American Studies Program. Dr. Siplon, who had a prior Fulbright in Tanzania in 2005, has research interests in HIV/AIDS; health policy in developing countries; U.S. domestic and international health policy and foreign aid policy; and sub-Saharan Africa (particularly Tanzania). In recent years, she has had six opportunities to take students or alumni with her to East Africa or other developing countries to do research and/or service work.

Dr. David T.Z. Mindich, chair of the Saint Michael’s College journalism department, was been named the inaugural winner in 2011 of the "New England Journalism Educator of the Year Award" by the New England Newspaper & Press Association. "Over the past 15 years Dr. Mindich has done an outstanding job in helping prepare multi-talented journalists to handle all that is expected of graduates in the rapidly changing world of newspapers and media," the citation read.

Saint Michael's College was selected in January 2011 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to be included in the 2010 Community Engagement Classification. The Carnegie Foundation selected 115 U.S. colleges and universities for its 2010 Community Engagement Classification. In the notification letter from Anthony Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation, Saint Michael's was shown to have "excellent alignment among mission, culture, leadership, resources, and practices that support dynamic and noteworthy community engagement."

Prof. Catherine Hurst, co-vice chair of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival regional conference in Massachusetts in January 2011, was named winner of the Excellence in Directing Award, for the Saint Michael's College production of The Art of Dining.

Saint Michael's associate professor of physics, Dr. Alain Brizard, is the recipient of a grant from the Department of Energy for $33,000 each of the next three years, starting in 2011, to support his research. His research, titled, "Hamiltonian Formulations and Momentum Conservation Laws of Reduced Plasma Models," was selected on the basis of peer review of "scientific/technical merit and broader impact."

Saint Michael's biologist Dr. Mark Lubkowitz and his students joined a team in 2010 of researchers from the University of Missouri, University of Florida, Purdue University and the University Nebraska-Lincoln, on a five-year project to study the genes that control the movement of carbohydrates in corn. Saint Michael's and the other four institutions, major research universities, have been awarded a $6.6 million grant from the Plant Genome Research Program at the National Science Foundation for a joint faculty-student research project.

Principal Investigator, Mathematics Professor Ellis-Monaghan and co-principal investigator Dr. Greta Pangborn, assistant professor of computer science were awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant of $200,002. "This NSF grant allows us to continue the collaborative work between math and computer science of designing nanoconstructs, with student assistants, that has the potential for wide practical application," Dr. Ellis-Monaghan said.

Saint Michael's astronomer, assistant professor of physics, Dr. John O'Meara and two collaborators were the first to identify the distance to a gamma ray burst on the night of August 13, 2010, using a telescope in Chile. Dr. O'Meara was at the Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Observatory when he was contacted by collaborators Hsiao-Wen Chen of the University of Chicago and J. Xavier Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and informed that NASA's SWIFT satellite had identified a candidate gamma ray burst. "These are exciting events," said Dr. O'Meara. "When a candidate burst is detected by satellites, telescopes all over the world race to see who can identify if it is indeed a gamma ray burst, and to obtain information like its brightness and distance—this time, our team came out on top," Dr. O’Meara said.

Dr. Kristin Gehsmann, Saint Michael's associate professor of education, was named winner of the 2011 CODiEAward, in the category of Best Professional Development. Dr. Gehsmann was on the team that wrote, built and published the winning project, Words Their Way Online Workshop. The award was announced by SIIA, the Software and Information Industry Association, at the 8th annual Ed Tech Industry Summit in Washington, D.C., May 2011.