Mentor Awards – UROP Symposium

Mentor Awards

UROP Outstanding Mentor Awards

The UROP Outstanding Mentor Award Ceremony will be held Wednesday, April 20th from 12:30pm – 1:30pm Eastern Daylight Time.

This $500 monetary award recognizes UROP research mentors for their outstanding mentorship of UROP students. The award recipients were nominated by their UROP students and selected by a committee composed of UROP Staff and Peer Facilitators. These individuals have shared their passion for their work, a talent for teaching, patience in training novice researchers, and have most notably taken an interest in their students’ academic, personal and professional futures. 

Outstanding Mentor Award winners will be announced during the ceremony and posted on the UROP website.

Outstanding Mentor Awards Keynote Speaker

Lorenzo García-Amaya is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance of Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he regularly teaches courses in Spanish Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Teaching Methods. He is also the co-director of the Speech Production Lab and has collaborated on research grants with faculty from the Departments of Linguistics, Psychology, and History, and from Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. 

Professor García-Amaya received his B.A. in English Languages and Literatures from the University of Seville; as part of his degree, he completed a year abroad in translation and interpreting studies at Hogeschool Gent in Belgium. After completing his undergraduate degree, he moved to the United States to pursue an M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He worked in the Second Language Psycholinguistics Lab with Professor Isabelle Darcy and wrote his dissertation focused on the relationship between cognitive abilities, such as lexical access, lexical retrieval, and attention control, and oral fluency, which refers to the ways in which second-language speech can be temporally quantified.

One of the first major initiatives established by Professor García-Amaya upon arriving at Michigan in 2012 was to create a community of aspiring researchers through UROP, and during his first year he recruited an amazing cohort of nine students, of diverse backgrounds and academic interests. Since then, he has mentored more than fifty students through UROP and nearly fifty more undergraduate students through independent studies, honors theses, and creative projects. His former mentees have gone on to pursue graduate degrees at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Washington University, the University of Utah, and the University of Hawaii, among others.

In his research, Professor García-Amaya engages with Second Language Acquisition at the intersection of several areas of inquiry that often go unconnected, including (i) second-language oral fluency; (ii) captioning effects in second-language grammar learning; and (iii) language use and interaction during the study-abroad experience. Within each of these areas, his research investigates several potent catalysts for language acquisition, including cognition, cross-language influence, salience, and attention. To explore these themes, Professor García-Amaya implements a range of methodologies that include data-tracking surveys, hypothesis-driven experiments, classroom interventions, and qualitative designs. He publishes in top journals in his field, such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition and Modern Language Journal, and many of his articles include co-authorship with undergraduate and graduate students who have collaborated with him through the Speech Production Lab. Professor García-Amaya has also published public essays intended for non-academic publics, such as in Inside Higher Ed, The Conversation, and Babel. Professor García-Amaya was most recently awarded the University of Michigan Golden Apple Award, in 2020, and LSA’s Outstanding Individual Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, in 2021. Finally, his Ted-Ed “Why do we, like, hesitate when we, um, speak?” has been viewed more than two million times! 

Outstanding Mentor Nominees

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