At the Society’s annual luncheon in Albuquerque on January 7, President Joan Houston Hall announced her selection of three students as Presidential Honorary Members. The students, who will receive free membership in ADS from 2006 through 2009, are the following:

Jeannine Carpenter: Jeannine is a PhD student in English and Sociolinguistics at Duke University. In his nomination letter Walt Wolfram said, in part:

She is a quick read intellectually, has exceptional analytical abilities, and writes up the results of her analyses skillfully…. She exhibits extraordinary leadership qualities and is the most proactive and responsible student in our current program. She also has assumed mentoring responsibilities for some of the less-experienced students in our program, and is exemplary in her leadership role with these students.

Patricia Irwin: Tricia is a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire who was nominated by Naomi Nagy and Malcah Yeager. They say of her:

She is really sharp, intellectually curious, and hard working, and she interacts very constructively with other students and with faculty and learns new material quickly….Her numerous and ever more complex (though always beautifully organized and presented) revisions of her chapter on Nepali sentence structure show real linguistic insight and a keen ability to learn and use new tools.

Rebecca Roeder: Becky, who is finishing her PhD at Michigan State University, was nominated by Dennis Preston, who wrote:

Her work is first-rate; she is already a seasoned, flexible, and skilled instructor.She is an outstanding linguistics grad student and has now begun to carve out a specialized area in which she has already begun to gain national recognition, not only for the novelty of her research venue but also for the important Second Language Acquisition and sociolinguistic implications of her findings.

Congratulations, Jeannine, Tricia, and Becky!