Bates College President Elaine Tuttle Hansen has been honored as an outstanding alumna educator by the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association.

Hansen, a 1969 graduate of Mount Holyoke, has been Bates president since 2002.

In receiving the alumnae association’s Elizabeth Topham Kennan Award during the college’s alumnae reunion in May, Hansen was praised for her “respect for teaching and working with students” and her “administrative prowess and deep love of the liberal arts.”

Those talents and attitudes, noted the award citation, “combine to make you a strong president.”

The award citation said that Hansen’s “colleagues have called you ‘an exceptionally capable leader and administrator’ and laud your ‘combination of intellectual leadership, vision for the college, and managerial acumen.’ Yet they also note your open and enthusiastic style, which has helped you forge strong working relationships with trustees, faculty, staff, and students.”

Hansen was lauded for leading Bates through a successful fundraising campaign, supervising development of a Campus Facilities Master Plan, initiating major construction projects and overseeing the implementation of Bates’ new General Education curriculum and new interdisciplinary initiatives.

Completed in 2006, The Campaign for Bates: Endowing Our Values raised $121 million for endowed scholarships, faculty support and academic quality, as well as for annual giving, campus revitalization and new facilities. In 2008, Bates opened a new dining Commons, new residence hall, and Alumni Walk, a major new cross-campus walkway.

Mount Holyoke’s Elizabeth Topham Kennan Award, presented periodically to an outstanding alumna educator, honors the service that Mount Holyoke President Emerita Elizabeth Topham Kennan gave to her college and to higher education. Joining Hansen as 2009 honorees were Anne Conger McCants, a member of the Mount Holyoke Class of 1984, and Nancy Ahlberg Mellor, a member of the Class of 1959.

The Kennan Award has been given only three other times since its 1995 establishment. Prior recipients are Elizabeth Topham Kennan ’60 (1995), Elizabeth Wilson Poe ’72 (2000) and Nancy R. Disenhaus ’72 (2002).

“I’m so honored, and once again incredibly grateful to Mount Holyoke,” Hansen said of the award. “Anything I have accomplished speaks largely to the transformative power of my liberal arts education at the nation’s first and still best college for women.”

The full citation will be available online in July 2009.

Bates and Mount Holyoke colleges have received a grant of $65,000 to fund the development of teaching tools in bioinformatics — the use of computing technology in biological research, such as gene mapping.

The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of digital technology to enrich liberal-arts education, awarded the grant to the two colleges. The funds will support a three-part program that will enable faculty, staff and students from Bates, Mount Holyoke and other schools to develop course modules that make bioinformatics resources accessible to students.

The first part of the program is a two-day workshop at Mount Holyoke in May, in which staff from the National Center for Biotechnology Information will explain the use of existing bioinformatics tools and resources, such as its “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool,” a powerful, very complex search engine used in genomics and other biological research.

A retreat at Bates in June will allow faculty, information-technology staff and students from several schools to adapt information from the NCBI workshop for use in specific courses. The aim is to develop “toolkits” that will introduce such resources as BLAST to undergraduate students.

The third piece in the program is the publication of these teaching tools for broad academic use.

The two colleges applied for $35,000, but NITLE was impressed enough by the proposal that it offered an additional $30,000. Where participation in the Bates retreat program was originally intended to be limited to New England schools, the additional funds have allowed Bates and Mount Holyoke to give it a national scope.

The funding hike “widens the audience and widens the possibility of projects, so it was an excellent development,” says Michael Hanrahan, assistant director and instruction coordinator for Information and Library Services at Bates. “It’s a vote of confidence that speaks well to the combined talent and ability of the technical staffs and faculty” at the two colleges.

The grant comes as Bates plans the creation of a digital imaging center that will serve both the science and visual art curriculums. The center will provide, among other enhancements, highly advanced resources for research and the representation of data in the sciences.