Industrial Distribution advisor and program manager Kristen Craig has been honored with the UAB Collat School of Business’s inaugural Collat Staff Award.
Nominated by Collat faculty and staff and voted on by the business school’s staff, the award honors staff members who exemplify the university’s shared values of collaboration, integrity, respect, excellence and innovation.
Craig, an academic advisor and program manager in the Department of Marketing, Industrial Distribution, and Economics, was nominated by professors Tom DeCarlo, Colleen McClure and Josh Robinson.
“Kristen is recognized throughout the business school for her outstanding work as an academic advisor and advocate of continual improvement,” DeCarlo wrote in his nomination letter. “She continually performs above and beyond the call of duty and I am amazed at her tireless dedication to our students and the Collat School of Business.”
DeCarlo credited Craig with leading the charge to restructure the distribution major and proposing innovative solutions to help evolve the program to match changes in the industry.
Craig has been an integral part of the development of the distribution program through the years. In 2017, alumnus Kenny Wolf created the Lighting Solutions Kristen Craig Endowed Scholarship in Industrial Distribution to fund a student scholarship in her honor due to the positive impact she has had on ID students and her outstanding outreach efforts to companies in the field over the years.
“She is always available to students and routinely offers her personal cell phone number to those who need to reach her,” De Carlo wrote. “Her commitment to communication with, and counseling of, students is without a question the strongest I have ever witnessed.”
And just this year the university honored Craig for her 30 years of service to UAB, the Collat School of Business, and the Charles & Patsy Collat Industrial Distribution Program. Craig came to UAB in 1994 after graduating from Clemson University with both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.