Penelope Van Tuyl, Victor Madrigal, and Madika Bryant are this year’s recipients of the award, which recognizes staff who are exceptionally passionate about their work and supportive of their colleagues. President Saller will present the awards at a ceremony on Thursday.
Each year, staff from across the university find creative ways to surprise a colleague with the news that they’re a recipient of the Amy J. Blue Award. This year, the method of choice was to stage a fake meeting.
That’s how Victor Madrigal, Penelope Van Tuyl, and Madika Bryant each learned they’d won this year’s award.
Presented every spring, the Amy J. Blue Award recognizes Stanford staff for their exceptional contributions to the university, passion for their work, and support for their colleagues. This year, the Stanford community submitted 712 nominations for 293 individuals.
The award comes with a $4,000 prize. It is named for the late Amy J. Blue, a longtime Stanford employee who held numerous positions at the university in the 1970s and ’80s, including assistant provost from 1973 to 1978, and associate vice president for administrative services and facilities from 1987 to 1988. Blue died of brain cancer in Palo Alto in 1988. She was 44.
President Richard Saller will present the awards at a ceremony on Thursday, May 16, at 4 p.m. in Lagunita Courtyard. All are welcome to attend.
Penelope Van Tuyl’s faculty directors called her into a fake meeting to break the news that she’d won the award.
“They ambushed me here at our office and I was totally surprised!” she said.
Van Tuyl is a human rights lawyer and associate director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, which is marking its 10th anniversary at Stanford this month.
“Getting to work in this environment and be around great people every day brings me a tremendous amount of joy,” she said. “I also have a ton of personal history here, so this place feels like home.”
Van Tuyl’s parents met when they were Stanford undergraduates in the 1960s. Born at Stanford Hospital and raised in Palo Alto, she met her husband on campus when they were teenagers. Van Tuyl graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where she studied international relations and Latin American studies. She returned to the Bay Area to study at the UC Berkeley School of Law, from which she earned a JD.
While a law student, Van Tuyl began working at UC Berkeley’s War Crimes Studies Center, founded by David Cohen, who offered her a job upon graduation. The center was later renamed the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and in 2014 moved to Stanford. Van Tuyl is involved in every aspect of the center, managing operations, the budget, supervising staff, and supporting academic and research programs. She and Cohen also developed an undergraduate minor in human rights, and Van Tuyl teaches the popular gateway course, HUMRTS 101.
“It may have begun life at Berkeley, but at Stanford the Center truly leapt up and soared, enabled by the rich relationships that Penelope forged for the last 10 years,” wrote one nominator. “Kind, honest, loving, giving, upbeat, and utterly devoted to her students and her family, Penelope exemplifies what it means to honor Amy Blue’s legacy.”
“Pursuing a career in human rights is not easy,” another nominator wrote. “And Penelope, with much warmth and compassion, has gracefully guided students through extraordinarily difficult summer study abroad and their first few years in the rough-and-tumble of striving for justice.”
Van Tuyl said she’s grateful to be recognized and help carry forth Amy J. Blue’s legacy.
“Amy J. Blue’s friends saw and valued Amy for who she was and the passion she brought to her work for this university,” she said. “To get that same recognition from my own friends and colleagues means more than I can say. Receiving this award makes me feel very seen and valued for the things I value most about my job.”