Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award

Chancellor Joanne Li (left), Kay A. Keiser, Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award recipient, Interim Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Deborah Smith-Howell, and Dean Nancy Edick.

Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award

The Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, presented by the Office of Graduate Studies, was created to recognize individual faculty who place high values on and excel in mentoring graduate students. Recipients must have an established record of teaching excellence at the graduate level and mentoring students who have received their degrees. They also should excel at attracting graduate students to study at UNO through recruitment efforts and a visible and respected academic reputation in their area of expertise.

Kay A. Keiser, Ed.D Department of Educational Leadership College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences

Kay A. Keiser, Ed.D, is associate professor and former chair of the Department of Educational Leadership. She teaches and researches in educational leadership and school administration. She serves as Graduate Program Chair for the master’s and doctoral program in educational administration. In 2014, she received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the UNO College of Education. She is the coauthor of Prepare to Chair: Leading the Dissertation and Thesis Process and coeditor of Women in Educational Leadership: A Practitioner’s Handbook. Keiser has served as dissertation chair for 57 Ed.D. graduates and on over 100 other doctoral committees. She earned her BS in elementary education, MS in literacy, and Ed.D. in educational administration at UNO. She worked as teacher and administrator in the Omaha Public Schools for 25 years and is recipient of the Alice Buffett Outstanding Teaching Award.

Dr. Keiser has been a faculty leader at UNO for over 16 years and in that time has had a transformational impact on students’ academic development in Educational Leadership. She served as department chair of this graduate unit for 6 years and has fostered a culture that puts mentorship as a central goal. As her nominator notes, “Dr. Keiser has shaped a departmental model that is highly adaptive to individual graduate student needs and encourages the kind of dissertation research from our doctoral students that will have lasting social impact.” Moreover, Dr. Keiser has helped refine the mentorship process for the field, co-authoring a book on how to effectively guide students through the dissertation process. This work in part helped to earn her the 2014 UNO Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award for the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. For these and many other reasons, we are proud to honor Dr. Keiser with this award for excellence in graduate mentorship.

Nomination Information

Review the detailed nomination criteria and download the nomination form

Nomination deadline: March 1

Previous Award Winners

View the full list of award recipients