Dr. Laurel Hawthorne Carney was named the 2019 Distinguished Alumna of Girls Preparatory School during the annual Reunion Weekend luncheon.
Carney, GPS class of 1979, is a professor and researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rochester. She and her team explore the intricacies of the human auditory system in an effort to help those with hearing loss, particularly in noisy backgrounds.
She received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from MIT and her master's and doctoral degrees, also in electrical engineering, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania before going on to her career as a professor and researcher.
In addition to writing 85 published studies, Carney has won the 2015 William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience from the Acoustical Society of America. She is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
She is currently a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Neurophysiology. She and her husband, David Cameron, live in Geneva, New York.
Taylor Warren, GPS class of 2004, received the Margaret Lupton Award of Excellence.
Warren joined the World Health Organization in February as a technical officer in Geneva, Switzerland. In this role she supports operational readiness, getting countries ready for emergency response. Before that, she worked in the public health field in the African nations of Guinea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Kenya, Darfur, South Sudan and Nigeria.
After earning her master's degree in public health in forced migration from Columbia University, Warren spent a year with Catholic Charities, working in infection prevention and control and supporting Ebola response in Guinea and Liberia. She then spent three years as a field epidemiologist for Médecins Sans Frontières (France's Doctors without Borders), working with responses to measles, malaria, cholera and Ebola, as well as developing training modules for incoming epidemiologists.
While at Columbia, Warren served as a teaching assistant and consultant intern for Catholic Relief Services. She is fluent in French and knows Kinyarwanda, the official language of Rwanda.
Notable Alumnae Award Winners
In 2017, GPS established a Notable Alumnae Awards Program to recognize outstanding graduates. One alum from each five-year reunion class is chosen through a selection process that includes nominations by classmates. The Distinguished Alumna and Lupton Award recipients are chosen from these class nominations.
The class of 1969, in celebration of its 50th reunion, chose to be recognized as a class. Corinne Anderson Adams wrote a tribute to the entire class and read it at the luncheon.
* Helen Burns Sharp, class of 1964
* Dr. Mary Katherine Lawrence, class of 1974
* Dr. Laurel Carney, class of 1979
* Dr. Janet West Batanghari, class of 1984
* Amy Edgar Sklansky, class of 1989
* Lela Moore, class of 1994
* Marissa Shrum, class of 1999
* Taylor Warren, class of 2004
* Chelsey Smith, class of 2009
* Anna Carroll, class of 2014