2025 Faculty of the Year Fellow, Capstone Supervisor, and Instructor of the Year

Dr. Alyson Patsavas – Assistant Professor, Department of Disability and Human Development – College of Applied Health Sciences

Honors Faculty Fellows are individually assigned to provide personalized advising and mentoring to students. Each year, Honors College students nominate Fellows to be honored as “Fellow of the Year” for excellence in mentoring.

We are pleased to award the 2024-2025 title to Dr. Alyson Patsavas, Assistant Professor, Department of Disability and Human Development in the College of Applied Health Sciences.

Dr. Patsavas has served as a Faculty Fellow since 2019. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of disability studies, queer theory, and feminist theory and focuses on cultural discourses of pain, chronic illness, trauma, and disability. Her book, Pain in Relation: Causality, Chronicity, and Crip Evidence, won the 2023 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities and is forthcoming with Michigan University Press. Patsavas is a writer and producer on the documentary film Code of the Freaks (2020). She co-edited “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” a 24-piece collection of essays, creative work, and praxis projects found across two special-sections of Lateral. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Crip Magazine, Feminist Wire, and the Czech Sociological Review.

In nominating Dr. Patsavas, Honors student Tia Khan wrote, “My time with Dr. Patsavas made an ordinary college experience an extraordinary experience. My work with her has truly been invaluable to my personal, professional, and academic growth. Dr. Patsavas’ encouragement, support, and guidance in allowing me to choose both capstone and independent studies topics that were personally meaningful to me, allowed me to thrive academically by allowing my passion to shine through my writing. While she is kind and supportive, the work and research I have done under Dr. Patsavas has also been academically challenging and rigorous, which has brought out my best academic work and ensured I reach my highest potential.”

Dr. Sang-Oh Yoon – Associate Professor, Department of Physiology and Biophysics – College of Medicine

The Capstone Supervisor of the Year award is given annually to a faculty member for their outstanding mentorship of Honors College students’ Senior Honors Capstone projects.

This year’s Capstone Supervisor of the Year is Dr. Sang-Oh Yoon, Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, College of Medicine.  Dr. Yoon’s research focuses on cancer metabolism and resistance to anti-cancer drugs, and he has supervised undergraduate researchers in his lab and has also served as a Faculty Fellow since 2021.

Dr. Yoon received his Ph.D. from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea. He then joined Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow focusing on cancer research. Since joining the University of Illinois, Dr. Yoon has advanced his research on cancer metabolism. His ultimate goal is to establish the foundation for innovative tumor therapeutics by identifying and developing novel therapeutic targets to overcome cancer resistance. In addition to his research, Dr. Yoon actively contributes to academic services, such as directing courses and teaching graduate and medical students.

In nominating Dr. Yoon as Capstone Supervisor of the Year, Honors student Ishika Patel wrote: “When I first joined Dr. Yoon’s lab, I had little to no experience in research. However, under his guidance, I was able to quickly understand the fundamental concepts of scientific inquiry and laboratory work.  One of Dr. Yoon’s greatest strengths is his ability to provide constructive feedback. Whenever I made mistakes, which was often as I was still learning, he never expressed frustration or disappointment. Instead, he viewed each mistake as an opportunity for growth and encouraged me to learn from the experience. This approach not only alleviated any anxiety I had about making errors, but it also helped me to develop a growth mindset. I became more confident in my abilities and learned to approach problems from different perspectives, always focusing on how I could improve and apply the lessons learned.”

Dr. Faith R. Kares – Instructor – Honors College

The Instructor of the Year award is given annually to one of the many faculty members who teach our first-year Honors Core courses as well as our Honors Seminars for upperclassmen. This year’s Instructor of the Year is Dr. Faith R. Kares.

Dr. Kares is an educator, mentor, and researcher specializing in cultural anthropology, social movements, labor migration, humanitarianism, and racial and economic justice. She has taught for the Honors College since 2020 and loves learning from her students. Dr. Kares regularly applies her own experiences growing up in an immigrant, working-class background (and as a first-generation college student) to her work with young people, leading with inquiry and compassion. She is also the Associate Director of Research & Evaluation at Loyola University’s Institute for Racial Justice and serves on the Board of the Encampment for Citizenship, a national nonprofit that develops youth leadership.

Dr. Kares has developed and taught two courses for the Honors College: HON 122 Killing with Kindness: Humanitarianism and the Politics of “Doing Good” which considers what cultural and political-economic analyses bring to bear on volunteer and humanitarian aid efforts, who benefits from these efforts, and the manner in which the practices of NGOs and other entities alter democratic participation and processes, and HON 122 Jelly Donuts and Justice: The Role of Food in Social Movements & Community Organizing in which students learn about the role that food plays in both revealing social and economic inequities as well as in advancing justice for all.

In their nomination, one of Kares’s students, Zaaron Tyebjee, writes, “Professor Kares embodies what being a professor should mean. She challenges you, makes sure you’re taking care of yourself, she is thorough, and most of all, she is so incredibly passionate about her class – the teaching and the topic.” Zaaron adds that throughout the semester Professor Kares made sure they were not only being challenged but heard as well. “Even though this class was late in the evening, I found myself incredibly excited to see what we would be discussing. . .  I hope to know Professor Kares for a long time, and I’ll remember her forever.”