2013 Perkins Award for Excellence in Teaching

Catherine Combelles, Assistant Professor of Biology, has been awarded the 2013 Perkins Award for Excellence in Teaching

Professor Combelles combines her passion for teaching with her cutting-edge research into oocyte development.  Leading a team of Middlebury undergraduates, Combelles is currently studying the effect of antioxidents on oocyte development under the aegis of a grant funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (An oocyte is the cell from which an egg develops.) Combelles and her students have also frozen human oocytes to help young cancer patients preserve their fertility, and later this year she will submit a proposal to the National Institutes of Health for a major grant to study the effect of obesity on fertilized oocytes.

Professor Combelles was honored at a ceremony and dinner on April 4.

The Perkins Award is provided by the Professor Llewellyn R. Perkins and Dr. Ruth M.H. Perkins Memorial Research Fund, and it was made possible by a gift from Ruth Perkins, Middlebury Class of 1932, in memory of her husband, Llewellyn, who taught at Middlebury from 1914 through 1941. Professor Perkins founded and chaired the mathematics department.

Their children, Marion Perkins Harris ’57, a science teacher, and David Perkins, a physician, augmented the fund and expanded the scope of the award to honor their mother, Ruth, as well as their father. The award supports the recipient’s faculty development. It is presented in even-numbered years to a member of the mathematics or computer science department, and in odd-numbered years to a faculty member who teaches in the natural sciences.

Catherine Combelles with
members of the Perkins family.