Recipient Named in Inaugural Gary Kelly First-Year Student Award at Clarkson University

Clarkson University Professor Emeritus Gary Kelly left a lasting impression on the Honors Program. That is why Honors Director Dr. Kate Krueger and Professor Emeritus David Craig worked to create the "Gary Kelly First-Year Student Award" as a way to honor Kelly after he passed away last month due to complications from liver cancer.

“This award recognizes a student demonstrating the Honors values of critical thinking, curiosity, and ethical inquiry. Recipients will be selected by the first-year Honors faculty, who can best assess the most outstanding student in the early coursework,” Dr. Krueger said.

The first person chosen for the award is freshman honors student Kirby Davidson, a chemistry and biomolecular science double major from Red Hook, New York.

“Winning this award means so much to me. I’ve worked really hard during my first semesters at Clarkson, and to be recognized by my professors in the Honors Program for the work I put in is something I’m really proud of,” Davidson said. “The Honors Program challenges me to think in a more interdisciplinary manner. As a STEM major, most of my classes are heavily focused on the analytical side of things, but the Honors program requires its students to think outside of our main disciplines and consider the effect our studies will have on the world around us.”

In 1996, President Denny Brown chose Professor Kelly to chair the committee charged with selecting the Honors Director and designing the program. He brought a crucial student life perspective to the design process, arguing that the honors curriculum ought to foster students’ personal and ethical development as well as their intellectual development.

As he wrote shortly before his death in March 2023, “My last few semesters in the HP (Honors Program), I learned a great deal about critical thinking and came to believe it to be one of the most important qualities of intellectual development. I think by using my students as examples that I became better at critical thinking myself than I had ever been.” As a result of Gary Kelly’s service, the Honors Program enjoyed some of its most significant achievements and became a community in which learning and research were a shared enterprise.

“I think I work diligently to embody the Honors values of critical thinking, curiosity, and ethical inquiry that Dr. Kelly instilled in his generations of students. I’m naturally very critical, both of myself and the things presented to me. I’ve never shied away from asking questions, perhaps to a fault when I was younger. I like to understand the why and how of what I’m doing rather than just the end product, and to get that sort of an understanding you often have to ask questions – a lot of them. I hope that during my time at Clarkson, I’ll continue to embody these ideals, both in my personal and work life,” Davidson said.