The Clayman Institute announces the 2017 Lozoff and Yalom prize winners

The 2017 recipients of the Lozoff and Yalom prizes have been announced by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

The Marjorie Lozoff Prize is awarded annually to further scholarship in women's development for the benefit of women, men, children, and society. This prize honors the memory of Marjorie Morse Lozoff. In an extraordinarily productive life as wife, mother, sociologist, social worker, teacher, researcher, and community leader, Lozoff served as a model for the idea that most deeply absorbed her: furthering women's development for the benefit of women, men, children, and society.

This year’s Lozoff Prize recipient is Amee Azad, a first year medical student in the School of Medicine, nominated by Professor of Surgery, Sherry Wren, who is also a former faculty research fellow at the Clayman Institute. 

Amee is from Floyds Knobs, Indiana, and is currently pursuing her MD at Stanford University, focusing on disparities in global surgery and health justice. She received her BA, summa cum laude, in biochemistry and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Amee enjoys exploring medicine through design and is working on a project to improve post-operative care in cleft palate surgery. She is also an advocate for health justice and works on issues of gun violence, racial disparities, and healthcare reform. 

Amee will be in Malawi this summer, under Professor Wren’s direction, where she will do research examining reasons for gender disparities in low income countries in receipt of surgical care. As Amee noted in her application, “previous studies have shown that women are significantly less likely to receive surgery than men, especially in the developing world, but no work has been done in this area to understand what factors are causing this disparity in access.”  Amee anticipates that “this experience would be invaluable to my research and academic development and integrate well into the work I hope to do as an aspiring surgeon.” 

The Marilyn Yalom Research Fund Prize of $1500 has been awarded to Justine Modica, a second year graduate student in the History Department at Stanford University. 

The graduate prize is named in honor of Dr. Marilyn Yalom, who has been part of the Clayman Institute since 1976, having served as both Associate Director and Acting Director. She is currently a Senior Scholar, and is well known as an internationally acclaimed literary scholar of women's and gender issues. The prize provides funds for research expenses and/or conference costs directly relating to research. Justine was nominated by Robinson Professor in U.S. History, Estelle Freedman, who has also been a faculty fellow at the Clayman Institute.

Justine is pursuing work on anti-abortion arguments and activism. She graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in History. She will be using her research prize funds to view archival materials and interview local residents in parts of the country—such as Wichita, Kansas—that become protest sites for Operation Rescue. In her research description, Justine specified that she will “explore conservative responses to Operation Rescue, in particular how commentators across the political spectrum, and at the local, state, and national levels, responded to Operation Rescue’s use of street-level protest and physical nonviolent resistan[ce] to demonstrate against liberal abortion laws, a platform which most mainstream republicans endorsed.” She anticipates expanding this project into both a conference paper and a journal article upon completion of her research with the hope it might “shed light on various rationales for involvement in extremist pro-life activism and demonstrate why the anti-abortion movement holds such an endearing appeal nearly forty-five years after...Roe v. Wade.”

Our congratulations to both Amee and Justine as they pursue their research!