Faculty and Department Awards

Dr. Laura Padilla-Walker and Dr. Daniel Snow were chosen as this year’s outstanding nominees, and they were recognized at the UAC's Twentieth Annual Awards Ceremony on March 24th, 2021.

In addition to being honored at the banquet, Dr. Padilla Walker and Dr. Snow have also earned the Accessibility Center Good Samaritan Mentored Learning Award for their respective colleges. This award, established by our generous donors, Keith and Carol Jenkins, provides substantial funding to be used for mentored student learning within the colleges.

Laura Padilla-Walker

Laura Padilla-Walker is a professor in the School of Family Life and an Associate Dean in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences. She received her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005. Her scholarship focuses primarily on how parents socialize adolescents’ positive behaviors, with special emphasis on parent-child communication about healthy sexuality and prosocial media. She also studies the development of prosocial behavior during adolescence. Dr. Padilla-Walker has over 100 journal publications and has co-edited three volumes with Oxford University Press. She also has co-authored a book on parenting and healthy sexuality with Deseret Book. Dr. Padilla-Walker has taught hundreds of students in classes such as child development, adolescent development, moral development, and parenting. She has had the opportunity to engage in mentored research with over 500 students on the Flourishing Families Project, Project MEDIA, and The Healthy Sexuality Project. She has also worked closely with students to establish college-wide diversity and inclusion initiatives to better support marginalized students and help all feel included at BYU. She and her husband, Chris, are the parents of three children. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, biking, cooking, and spending time with her family. Dr. Padilla-Walker continually goes above and beyond to advocate for and help students with disabilities. She takes the time to reach out to students who have accommodations to discuss how she can best help them succeed, and she checks in on them when they are unable to attend class. In some instances, she goes beyond what disability law requires and restructures portions of her class in order to better accommodate disabled students.

Daniel Snow

Daniel Snow is an associate professor and Lee Tom Perry Distinguished Fellow in the Marriott School of Business, where he serves as director of MBA Programs. Dr. Snow received his bachelor’s degree in international relations and his MBA in finance and operations, both from BYU. He received his PhD in business administration from University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in 2004. In addition to teaching at the Marriott School, he has also taught at Oxford’s Said School of Business, Harvard Business School, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth Tuck School of Business. Dr. Snow has worked for Ford Motor Company as a financial analyst, and he serves on the Board of Directors of Ceramic Process Systems. His research addresses two areas. The first seeks to improve our understanding of technological innovation, and specifically of the complex relationship between new and old technologies that exists during technology transitions. His second area of research is in service operations--both in the building of theoretical microfoundations to help define the field, and in empirical research on the impact of IT on service employee productivity. At the Marriott School, Dr. Snow has received numerous awards, including an Outstanding Researcher Award, Outstanding Teaching Award, and Ethics Teaching Award. Dr. Snow offers support and resources to his students with disabilities in a variety of ways, including reaching out to them, lending a listening ear, encouraging them to seek treatment, and helping them find study spaces. He gives them hope and expresses confidence in their ability to succeed. Students have expressed that he is incredibly empathetic, action-oriented, and discreet, and that he is clearly motivated to empower students to be successful regardless of their challenges.