Professor Thanh Tran and Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty Development & Academic Affairs Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes have been recognized for their outstanding contributions to community service and the work-family community, respectively.
Thanh Tran
On May 30 at the President’s Retirement Recognition Dinner, University President William P. Leahy, S.J., presented Thanh Tranwith the 2018 Community Service Award. The award recognizes the outstanding contributions of a Boston College employee whose actions truly exemplify the Jesuit spirit of community service and involvement. The citation read the night of the event praised Thanh’s “dedicated work with BC undergraduate and graduate students both in the classroom and on interdisciplinary research trips to Vietnam, as well as his quiet leadership and tireless efforts over three decades to improve the lives of Vietnamese Americans in Randolph and the Greater Boston area. As a scholar and devout Catholic, he is a man who embodies the true Jesuit ideal of serving others in need.”
Tran has volunteered every Sunday since 2009 at St. Bernadette’s Church in Randolph, where he established the Vietnamese Language Program. The oft-praised program provides Vietnamese language and cultural education to children from all ethnic and racial backgrounds on the South Shore and offers children and their families a safe environment to develop a strong American identity while appreciating and embracing their Vietnamese heritage. Tran is an accomplished poet and writer who has donated the proceeds of his books to fund scholarships for underserved students. He has also held a poetry reading to help raise funds to construct and support the establishment of a school in his village in Vietnam.
Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes
On June 21, Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes will receive a Special Lifetime Achievement Award from Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) in recognition of her extraordinary contributions since the 1980s to building the work-family community, contributing to its scholarship, and ensuring that that scholarship translates into practice. This honor is given at the discretion of the WFRN Executive Committee and is awarded on an irregular basis. WFRN itself is a testament to Marcie’s dedication to work-life research as well as her long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary work.
Pitt-Catsouphes is not only the co-president of WFRN but is the co-chair of the 2018 conference at which she will receive the award. The organization is an international professional association of scholars drawn from anthropology, demography, economics, epidemiology, sociology, social work, and management that seeks to promote knowledge and understanding of work and family issues among the community of global stakeholders. WFRN grew out of the groundbreaking work that Pitt-Catsouphes did in founding the Sloan Work and Family Research Network in 1997. Her challenge to scholars at that time was to transcend the confines of their own disciplines and engage in rigorous discourse that could result in new ideas which might benefit both employers, employees, and their families.
In announcing this honor, WFRN also cited some of Pitt-Catsouphes’s many other accomplishments, including that she was co-director and then director of BC’s Center for Work & Family (1997-1999), U.S. founding co-editor of the journal Community, Work and Family (1998-2002), on the Board of Directors of the Center for Families at Purdue University Board of Directors (2006-2014), editor (with Ellen Ernst Kossek and Stephen Sweet) of the first and only Work and Family Handbook: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches, founder and executive director of the Boston College Center on Aging and Work (2005-2015), and founding editorial board member of the Aging, Work & Retirement Journal.