by Tim White
Early Career Award
Mariana Di Giacomo
Natural History Conservator, Yale Peabody Museum, New Haven, CT 06511 USA
The SPNHC Early Career Award is given to a member at an early stage in their career, or at an early stage in their involvement with SPNHC, who has demonstrated great potential for leadership through innovative and energetic service that strengthens and broadens the impact of SPNHC. It is with great pleasure that the 2024 recipient of this award is Mariana Di Giacomo from the Yale Peabody Museum (YPM).
In a very short time, Mariana has made a significant impact on SPNHC and the natural history collections community. In 2016 at our annual meeting, my wife Maureen and I were walking out of a Starbucks in Berlin where we came upon Mariana sitting outside and browsing the meeting program. This was her first SPNHC meeting and she showed us all the energy and enthusiasm that we would come to appreciate. Three years later I had the good fortune to hire Mariana into the role of our Natural History Conservator at YPM.
One of the first conversations I had with Mariana was about the opportunity she had before her. I told her she had an opportunity not just to do good things for Peabody and Yale, that this was a chance to have an impact on the natural history and museum community, and that she should find a way to have that kind of impact. Since Mariana landed at Yale, she played a major role in the revitalization of the Peabody through her work on the Peabody’s renovation and as chair of a campus-wide conservation group that had been dominated by the art gallery conservators. Without missing a beat Mariana found her own unique stamp on this role.
Perhaps one of the ways Mariana has had the largest impact on our community has been with social media and using her humor and knowledge to promote natural history and conservation to a broader audience. Her reels on Instagram and TikTok demonstrate a sense of best practices and standards with a touch of humor and have found an audience that spans groups of people familiar with museums and collections, and those unfamiliar with our community. These reels are the kind of thing that once you see one, you can’t wait to see what she is going to come up with next. Along the way, she has generated a following.
Congratulations, Mariana. I can’t wait for your next reel to drop!
SPNHC Presidents Award
Laura Marie Abracinskas
Michigan State University Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
The SPNHC President’s Award is given out for superior service to the society, including exceptional service to appointed offices, committees, and/or ongoing activities of SPNHC. It is with great pleasure that the 2024 recipient of this award is Laura Marie Abracinskas from Michigan State University.
Laura Abracinskas has been the collections manager for the vertebrate collections at the Michigan State University Museum for the past 31 years, and through her efforts, she has brought distinction to her museum. She has been awarded 19 Institute of Museum and Library Service grants for collections care and her countless other efforts put MSU on the map for collections stewardship.
Laura has been an unsung hero in SPNHC for far too long. She has been an active member of SPNHC since 1994 and has served on six committees, including three committees for more than ten years, and one committee for 18 years. Over the course of her career, many people have sought Laura’s advice because of her commitment to making SPNHC a worldwide leader in collections care. When Laura agrees to be on a committee or take on a task, she does not jump into the shallow end of the pool but dives into the deep end. She is there to contribute in a meaningful way. At a time when membership was dwindling, she dove in and helped recruit the next generation of emerging professionals into the organization.
In 2000, along with Lori Benson, Laura co-chaired the Education and Training Committee and brought new energy to the society with a series of workshops and training opportunities for our membership that many of us have benefited from. Laura has served as an associate editor of Collections Forum for years and has also been an editor of the SPNHC/AIC Connecting to Collections collaboration that looks at preventative conservation.
Following a successful annual meeting in London in 2005 there was interest in how SPNHC could reach a broader audience and have more impact globally. SPNHC established a Long-Range Planning Committee in 2006 that Laura was a member of and is still a member today. One of the tasks of that committee was to survey the membership to tell us what we needed to focus on and to develop a strategic plan. In talking with Rich Rabeler who chaired that committee, it was Laura who grasped the vision of this survey and painstakingly teased apart each question to make sure we were getting the information we needed to grow the society. One of those goals that came out of that survey was to increase the international presence of SPNHC, which should not be lost on anyone as we have now met outside North America seven times in the past 20 years and have become a premier internationally recognized organization.
As much as Laura would like to remain anonymous, please join me in congratulating her as the 2024 recipient of the SPNHC President’s Award.
Tim White
SPNHC Class of 1986