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Leeds faculty do more than just teach—they encourage, mentor and advocate for their students. Meanwhile, Leeds staff show up every day to help students have the best student experience possible and achieve their goals. These faculty and staff are recognized annually for their contributions to students’ education and experience. Here’s a look at some of our award recipients this year.

Frascona Teaching Excellence Award

Established by the Falkenberg family in 1992, the Joseph L. Frascona Teaching Excellence Award honors Leeds faculty who go the extra mile.

The recipient of the 2025 Frascona Teaching Excellence Award is Lev Szentkirályi, an assistant teaching professor in the Social Responsibility and Sustainability (SRS) Division. Szentkirályi called receiving the award “humbling and validating,” as he worked to reinvent himself as a teacher and scholar since joining Leeds in 2022, while noting that “faculty are only as good as their students.”

“You can have the best intentions and the best topics in a class, and if the students aren't there to help carry that burden of creating an engaging classroom, it's going to fail,” he said. “This award is on behalf of all those students who make teaching a privilege.”

Szentkirályi holds a PhD in political science from CU and a master’s in philosophy from the University of Connecticut. He also holds bachelor’s degrees in political science and environmental science. Before teaching at Leeds, he taught skills-based academic writing courses at the CU College of Arts and Sciences. No matter what he is teaching, he uses his multidisciplinary background to focus on applied ethics.

In the classroom, Szentkirályi consistently challenges students to make personal connections with course content, such as asking his first-year World of Business students to look at local Zillow listings and to critically reflect on the limited availability of affordable off-campus housing when discussing resource scarcity.

“If I can get them to be thinking about the relevance of these different topics that we talk about, and they can carry it with them into the future, that's where I hope the intangible meets the tangible,” he said. “I would like to think we're creating thoughtful generations of future community leaders.”

Finalists for the 2025 Frascona Teaching Award also included David Gross, a teaching professor and the associate chair in the Finance Division, and Erin Lionberger, an assistant teaching professor in Professional Effectiveness. Gross was recognized for his in-depth teaching materials and his sense of humor. He noted that humor is part of his natural communication style, which then shows up in his teaching.

“In any relationship or any situation in which you’re interacting with people, a connection is important,” he explained.

Lionberger garnered praise for her student engagement, which she does by relating the material to students’ lives.

“To be relatively early in my teaching career and reach finalist status feels pretty surreal,” she said. “I have to give a huge shoutout to my division and my colleagues—I definitely wouldn’t be here without their support and guidance.”

Innovative Teaching Award

The 2025 David B. Balkin and Rosalind & Chester Barnow Endowed Innovative Teaching Award has been awarded to Matthew Brady, an assistant teaching professor in the Organizational Leadership & Information Analytics (OLIA) Division. Brady’s courses are united in their entrepreneurial approach and embrace of AI technology.

“I try to bring these techniques into the classroom because I don't know another way,” Brady said. “I am an entrepreneur and I'm thinking about the students being entrepreneurs and future business leaders, and so I want to equip them accordingly.”

Brady’s courses often focus on “low-code” development—enabling students to use AI to build their own applications. As an instructor, he models his classroom after the boardroom, asking students to familiarize themselves with resources before class and then ask questions about what they have learned.

“I try to give them the tools and let them become the artists, and they can learn art by way of watching other artists learn,” he said. “That's a real joy.”

Brady has also helped found several hands-on learning opportunities for students, including the Sustainability Hackathon and the newly launched , which connects students to funding and mentors in the start-up world.

The runner-up for this year’s Balkin Award is Sina Khoshsokhan, assistant professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship.

Leeds Values Awards

The Leeds Values Award recognizes one staff member and one faculty member who best embody Leeds’ values. This year, the winners are Tracy Sanders and Yonca Ertimur.

2025 Leeds Value Award Winners Yonca Ertimur and Tracy Sanders

Yonca Ertimur is the Tandean Rustandy Esteemed Professor and the recipient of the 2025 Leeds Values Award for faculty, which she won due to her unwavering dedication to excellence and impact. Before her current position, she served as the senior associate dean for faculty, the acting dean of the Leeds School of Business and as the chair of the Accounting Division.

Tracy Sanders is the assistant to the division chairs at the Office of Finance and Administration. She is the recipient of the 2025 Leeds Values Award for staff for embodying Leeds values in all she does.