CLEVELAND – Northern Illinois' Dr. M. Courtney Hughes has been named the winner of the 2024 Mid-American Conference Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success. This accolade, awarded for the fifth consecutive year, celebrates the commitment to student success demonstrated by a selected full-time faculty member from each MAC institution. Hughes has not only stood out as a dedicated nominee from NIU but has also emerged as the overall conference winner.

Hughes is dedicated to improving population health and cultivating the next wave of public health scholars. Her research examines health behavior risks and enhancing quality of life for seriously ill individuals and their caregivers. Of her 38 papers since joining NIU in 2019, 25 include student authors. She teaches undergraduates through doctoral-level students and her grants have funded 24 students during her time at NIU.

Hughes is the Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) at NIU, where she brings experience as a former collegiate tennis player at the University of Notre Dame and her expertise in health and wellness to focus on student-athlete well-being. In 2023, she received the Sullivan Award for Excellence in Research and was awarded the Research Scholar designation in the College of Health and Human Sciences. She was an Associate Editor of BMC Health Services Research from 2019 through 2023 and is an active member of the Illinois Family Caregiver Coalition and Illinois Aging Together initiative.
 
She has helped enhance the curriculum at NIU by serving on curriculum committees every year and has disseminated best practices to the field by publishing education strategy articles in Pedagogy in Health Promotion. She is currently working on a dozen projects, all with student researchers, with a main goal for each student to discover their passions and experience success. Courtney received her doctorate in Health Services from the University of Washington School of Public Health and her master’s degree in Kinesiology from the University of Michigan.

For more on this year’s Outstanding Faculty institutional winners, click HERE