Media CenterACCU Gives President’s Distinguished Service Award to CRS President Carolyn Woo

The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) gave its 2016 President’s Distinguished Service Award to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) President Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo at its recent annual meeting in Washington, DC.

The award was given “for personal service of exceptional quality to Catholic higher education” to Woo who was dean of the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business for 14 years before coming to CRS in 2012.
 
“Carolyn is a fabulous leader,” Bill Nichols, an associate dean at the Mendoza School, said in a video tribute to Woo on the ACCU website. “She came to Notre Dame because of its Catholic character and especially because she believes in business as a calling … [that] she could take the values of the Catholic Church and bring them into the business world and make a difference in the world.”
 
“Perhaps her most remarkable accomplishment is she had to really rethink what it means to be a business school at a Catholic university,” said Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. “She came, she had a vision of what she wanted and she realized that vison, not simply a school great with academics in the classroom and maybe Mass on the side, but rather a school where in the classroom, in the research, faculty and students think about what it means to ask more of business.”
 
“This award is humbling to me,” Woo said in the video. “I don’t know how much I’ve achieved, but I know how much I have grown in being given the privilege of working in Catholic higher education, working with young people, helping them develop their faith, understand their agency, help them respond to the world’s problems.”
 
“That’s just a tremendously rewarding experience,” she said. “I could not be at CRS today without my journey in Catholic higher education.”
 
A native of Hong Kong, Woo came to the United States as a freshman at Purdue University, eventually earning a scholarship that took her through Ph.D. studies there. She was a faculty member and administrator at Purdue before joining Notre Dame in 1997.

Watch the ACCU video about Dr. Carolyn Woo: