Kimberlee Campbell, 2004 winner of the Distinguished Teacher Award

Kimberlee Campbell of the Harvard University Department of Romance Languages and Literature received the Mensa Foundation's Distinguished Teacher Award in 2004. She was nominated by Mensan Pierre-Alexandre Sicart. The following is excerpted from his nomination essay:

"K was my supervisor when I started teaching.... What solution she did not extract from her decades of experience, she helped us find with a common sense that made it appear as if the whole problem had never existed but in our heads. (Which I presume was often the case!)

"She was always open to new ideas if they could benefit her staff or the students, including to those ideas that meant even more work for her.... When my project had become too ambitious for me to handle alone, she came to my rescue; she became my 'partner in crime' and earned us a grant from one of the foremost universities in the country. We developed a complete set of phonetic tools for learners of French; it often meant working overnight and, I must say, younger generation or not, I was the first to show signs of weariness and the only one to get cranky.

"Yet we pulled it off. Because she believed in the project when nobody else world.... She reminded me that, to make things happen, you have to be a little crazy. I am very happy to be given the opportunity to nominate this 'a little crazy' person who spends so much time making sure that other people do not give up, that other people do not break down, that other people have a chance to make their dreams come true."