Longtime Employees Recognized for their Service

Ioana Patringenaru | Oct. 8, 2007

They’ve flown in military planes. They traveled to the Galapagos. They served UCSD for at least 10 years — and now they’re getting recognized.

A total of 472 staff members took part Thursday in this year’s Service Awards Ceremony, which celebrated its 40th anniversary.  In all, staff members recognized have put in 8,125 years of service and more than 16.9 million working hours, Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said.

Chancellor Marye Anne Fox addresses attendees at the Service Awards Ceremony.

“We’re proud of your accomplishments,” said Fox, before expressing her personal thanks and gratitude to the audience. “Without you, this university would be nothing.”

In all, 19 of Thursday’s honorees have been on campus for 35 years, some within the same department. Take Janet Shields, who built her career at the Marine Physical Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. UCSD won her loyalty when she had her children, now ages 27 and 30, she said. Shields said she assumed she would have to quit. Instead, the university allowed her to work from home and offered her a part-time schedule. “That was really appreciated,” she said. Shields is now a principal development engineer for the Atmospheric Optics Group at Scripps. She has flown in C-130 Hercules military planes and has installed research equipment all over the globe, from the Bahamas, to Germany and far-away New Guinea. “I’ve had a lot of fun,” she said.

Simone Green also has worked in the same area for the past 35 years – and she graduated from UCSD, too. A staff research associate, she investigates the factors involved in the development of heart disease and atherosclerosis, more specifically the development of plaque in the arteries. Green even had to go back to school in the 1990s to take molecular biology classes, which weren’t offered when she was a student. She said she decided to stay at UCSD all these years because of all the people she got to meet, including researchers from all over the world. “You get so many new ideas,” Green said. “It’s been a great place to do research.

People also are of the reasons that kept Annie W. Townsend at UCSD. She is now a senior museum scientist and manages the world’s largest collection of zooplankton at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, with more than 118,000 samples. Townsend said she remembers fondly a party her colleagues threw for her 20-year service award. Her supervisor in the Marine Life Research Group at the time, Edward Brinton, wrote a poem for her, as did another colleague. “It made me feel special,” she said.

Townsend also remembers fondly a research expedition in 1974. A vessel took her and her colleagues from San Diego to Peru, via the Galapagos Islands. “It’s such a unique environment,” she said. “To see nature at its best, is something I really love to do.”

Thursday, Assistant Vice Chancellor Tom Leet congratulated Townsend, Shields, Green and all their fellow service award recipients.

“Yours is an achievement of can-do spirit, creative problem-solving, high energy and sacrifice,” he said.