Marcy (Hamby) Towns ’84 was named the recipient of Purdue University’s Morrill Award for 2021. The award is the highest honor the university in West Lafayette, Indiana, confers on a member of its faculty – and comes with a $30,000 prize.
Towns is currently the Bodner-Honig Professor of Chemistry at Purdue. Her research focuses on factors that affect how students learn chemistry. Towns joined Purdue in 2006 after earning her master’s degree and doctorate from Purdue.
She is only the second scholar, and first woman, to be honored with three of the most prestigious national awards in chemistry education: the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Nyholm Prize (2019); the James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (2017); and the American Chemical Society’s Award in Research for the Teaching and Learning of Chemistry (2017).
Towns received Linfield’s Distinguished Alumna Award in 2015 and joined the Linfield University Board of Trustees in 2020.
