ASU employees earn recognition for their work on real-world solutions
ASU President Michael Crow addresses attendees of the 2025 President's Award recognition ceremony in Tempe on Dec. 11. Photo by Emmanuel Padilla/ASU
From a library that can be accessed anywhere in the world to an AI tool that analyzes speech to determine brain health, faculty and staff at Arizona State University are collaborating on projects that contribute to real-world change.
For this work, these projects have been honored with a 2025 President’s Award, which formally recognizes successful solutions in the following categories: Global Engagement, Principled Innovation, Social Embeddedness and Transdisciplinary Collaboration.
This year’s recipients were celebrated at a ceremony on Dec. 11 at Mountain America Stadium on the Tempe campus.
“President’s Award recipients exemplify ASU’s commitment to innovation, creativity and collaboration,” ASU President Michael M. Crow said. “Through their dedication and desire to design new and better ways to be of meaningful service — locally and globally — ASU is able to thrive, and I appreciate the opportunity to recognize their excellent work.”
Learn more about the individual winners.
Global Engagement
An international service learning program out of Barrett, The Honors College, this educational experience for ASU students involves them in real-world projects that positively impact communities in need around the world.
The program was born out of a project in 2006 that worked to help provide clean water to a Ghanaian village. Now projects range from prosthetic limbs to improved crop production with partners in 13 countries.
Principled Innovation
This unique retirement community sits in the heart of ASU’s Tempe campus, providing residents with access to university resources, culture and entertainment.
It features 239 independent-living apartments and 59 health care units, as well as an indoor pool and wellness center, physical therapy gym, theater, art museum, event and lecture hall, game rooms and more.
Residents have the opportunity to audit ASU classes and utilize the ASU Library, furthering their lifelong learning journey.
This initiative out of the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation promotes a team-based school staffing model to help support both teachers and students in K-12 classrooms.
The model, which has been deployed in schools around Arizona, has shown to reduce turnover rates among educators, create stronger student-teacher interactions and produce more collaboration among educators and students.
Learn how the model has been deployed at Westwood High School in Mesa.
This global humanitarian project provides solar-powered library devices that can be deployed anywhere in the world.
The devices, made of recycled plastic, create a Wi-Fi hot spot, so no electricity or internet connection is needed for users to download the locally specific content to a smartphone, tablet or laptop. More than 600 devices have been deployed worldwide, including in tribal communities in Arizona.
The initiative was also recently named one of TIME's 2025 Best Inventions.
Social Embeddedness
Hall of Teachers
Developed by SPLIT Studio at EdPlus at ASU in partnership with the Polynesian Voyaging Society, Hall of Teachers is an immersive exhibit that brings educators from Hawaiian history to life.
At the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, visitors encounter digital statues of individuals who played significant roles in the Hawaiian renaissance and fostered the revival of the Hawaiian tradition of deep-sea navigation.
The 85-inch display stands nearly 7 feet tall and projects more than 200 3D models and graphics with more than 30 minutes of audio and visual storytelling.
The Institute for Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) 2024
Held in summer 2024, CoLang brought the world’s leading Indigenous language activists, community scholars, students and academics to ASU to provide training in language documentation, preservation and collaborative practices.
The event was co-hosted by Arizona State University and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Fewer than 20 of the nation’s approximately 300 Indigenous languages are being passed down to children, making these languages critically endangered. The event directly addressed this crisis by providing community-centered training in language documentation and revitalization.
Storm Smart Schools Learning Lab
Launched by ASU’s Sustainability Teachers Academy in collaboration with Watershed Management Group, EcoRise and other partners, this initiative worked to install rainwater harvesting gardens at five Phoenix-area schools.
Green infrastructure like this provides vital shade and flood mitigation, especially in low-income areas that are more adversely affected by climate change challenges in Arizona. The gardens also provide a demonstration site for teachers to utilize as a learning laboratory.
Transdisciplinary Collaboration
Harnessing AI-based Speech Biomarkers for Neurological Disease
Uniting researchers in speech neuroscience, clinical neurology, artificial intelligence and regulatory science, this project uses speech as a biomarker to detect and track neurological diseases — such as ALS, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.
The technology aims to observe characteristic changes in speech patterns that often appear at the earliest stages of neurological diseases, as well as track and assess disease progression.
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