WSU Honors Hinckley, Collaboration winners for scholarship, STEM program
OGDEN, Utah – Weber State University’s Sara Dant has been named the 2019 John S. Hinckley Fellow, and the WSU Pre-Freshman Program (PREP) has been honored with the 2019 Exemplary Collaboration Award. The awards will be presented Nov. 15 at 12:30 p.m. in the Hurst Center Dumke Legacy Hall.
Hinckley Award
Weber State University history professor Sara Dant is a renowned expert on environmental history, having authored the book “Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West,” and co-authored the two-volume “Encyclopedia of American National Parks.”
Dant has also published dozens of articles, book chapters and reviews, and has shared her expertise in environmental history with a variety of audiences at places including Weber State, national parks and professional conferences. She’s also been able to use her expertise in the legal system, where the Utah Supreme Court recently upheld her testimony and expert witness report from a stream navigability case in district court.
Considered a preeminent environmental historian, Dant has also been invited to present a variety of scholarly and public presentations all across the United States.
“I am profoundly honored to receive the John S. Hinckley Fellow Award, especially given the high-caliber faculty here at Weber State,” Dant said. “And I am eternally grateful to the university for giving me the opportunity to do what I love and call it my ‘job.’”
As a professor and chair of the Department of History, Dant has demonstrated exceptional qualities of leadership to both her colleagues and students in the 18 years since she joined Weber State.
In addition to her numerous speaking engagements and publications, Dant remains popular in the classroom, receiving student reviews lauding her energetic and engaging teaching style.
“Dr. Dant has performed with extraordinary and constant competence as a popular and effective teacher, a dynamic and nationally recognized scholar, and as a willing and influential citizen of the campus and the community,” wrote Gene Sessions, WSU history professor and 1991 Hinckley Fellow, in a letter of recommendation.
Collaboration Award
The WSU PREP program is a seven-week summer STEM bootcamp for high-achieving junior high students, focusing on populations that are often underrepresented in STEM fields, including girls, minorities and first-generation college students.
The program is offered through WSU’s College of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology (EAST) with the support of the College 
of Science, and is made free to students through collaboration with partners including the Davis, Ogden and Weber school districts and support from Hill Air Force Base STEM, the Wadman Corporation, BAE Systems, Northrup Grumman, Rocky Mountain Power, Sorenson Legacy Foundation and the Ray & Tye Noorda Foundation.
The PREP program requires many people working together to make it happen, said Dana Dellinger, WSU’s Center for Applied Technology Outreach director.
“For that reason, it is especially sweet to win an award that recognizes the value of collaboration,” Dellinger said. “I’m appreciative of those on campus, in our school districts, in industry and from Hill AFB who contribute the time, money, good advice and plenty of patience it takes to have nearly 200 lively, intelligent junior high kids studying in our halls and playing under the Stewart Bell Tower each summer.”
Over the course of three summers, students are exposed to classes in STEM subjects such as logic and its application to math, introduction to engineering, problem solving in math and more. The students, ages 12 to 14, learn from industry, government and business professionals. The program first started in 2015 with 72 students, and by 2019, the program had grown to more than 191 students.
Students who are unprepared to succeed in college math are less likely to graduate in a timely manner, and are even less likely to pursue or obtain a degree in a STEM field. Math-intensive programs such as PREP help alleviate that.
While the main goal of the program is academic preparation, the positive relationships students build with each other and their WSU college-student mentors are highly valuable. For students from underrepresented populations, these relationships may be key to opening doors of opportunity and instilling social confidence in the students.
While research shows that the program’s focus populations, female and ethnic minority students, tend to lose interest in STEM subjects once they enter middle school, more than five years of data has shown WSU PREP to be successful in the key areas of maintaining the positive views in math and science that students held at the end of sixth grade through the often-challenging middle school years.
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