Peer Mentor Award winners announced

The Graduate School has recognized three exceptional graduate student mentors in the Peer Mentor Awards. Part of the Bucky Awards on campus, these recognize stellar mentorship qualities on- and off-campus.

The 2021 Peer Mentor Award winners are:

• Ariel Borns
• Annaliese Grant
• Taylor L. Watterson

Ariel Borns

Ariel Borns is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies (EPS) in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With a concentration in Comparative and International Education, her ethnographic research focuses on the various intersections of migration, international development, youth, and gender. Ariel has supported graduate and undergraduate students in the EPS department as an instructor, teaching assistant, and a graduate student representative. She holds an MA in EPS from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an MA in Teaching from Clark University, and BA in International Development and Social Change and Spanish from Clark University. She is a Graduate Research Fellow for the Institute for Research on Poverty and a Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program affiliate. She is currently a Project Assistant for the Center for Research on Early Childhood Education. Prior to graduate school, she was a middle school teacher in the United States.

Annaliese Grant

Annaliese Grant is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She broadly studies relationships, responsibilities, and media use among low- and middle-income families in the U.S. using both qualitative and quantitative methods. She has spent the last two years acting as the chair of the Sociology Graduate Mentoring Committee in her department, matching incoming first-year students with graduate student peer mentors and hosting mentoring events throughout the academic year. She cares deeply about information-sharing and community-building in graduate programs and has sought to foster those relationships among peers across the department.

Taylor L. Watterson

Taylor is a PhD Candidate in the Health Services Research in Pharmacy (HSRP) program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy. Taylor’s research focuses on describing fatigue in pharmacists—developing ways for health care practitioners to work at the top of their licenses. In addition to academic and research roles, Taylor also works as a pharmacist at several independent community pharmacies throughout the Madison area. Taylor’s mentoring philosophy involves valuing the individual, encouraging mentees to best the best versions of themselves, and creating an environment where mentees are excited to learn and motivated to apply what they are learning. She had the opportunity to mentor and advise junior graduate students as they enter the HSRP program, professional pharmacy (PharmD) students interested in research, as well as the UW–Madison Chapter of Kappa Psi Pharmaceutical Fraternity.