Professional Staff Award for Excellence

Maggie Feeney - Health and Wellness

Maggie has worked at Western for more than 20 years. For the past eight years, she has served as the Health Promotion and Communications Specialist in the Counseling, Health & Wellness Services unit within Student Affairs.

Maggie develops communication strategies to promote student well-being and access to student support services at Western. She designs messaging and materials for large-scale awareness months as well as stand-alone projects such as Western VoiceNotes, a well-being storytelling station.

Maggie's favorite part of her work is the opportunity to mentor student volunteers in the Wellness Advocate Program, helping to amplify their voices through the student-produced Campus Conversations podcast and @bewellwwu Instagram account. Their dedication to supporting their peers inspires her every day.

Maggie feels fortunate to collaborate with incredible colleagues across campus, people who are passionate about the holistic health and well-being of Western students.

Dina Murphy - Financial Aid

Dina has worked for the Financial Aid Department since 2000, when she began as a student employee while completing her bachelor’s degree in human services. After graduating from Western in 2002, Dina became a financial aid counselor and has had various roles in Financial Aid and the Scholarship Center since.

As assistant director of Financial Aid, Dina Murphy’s first priority is to do everything she can to ensure students get the financial aid they need, and she is tireless in this pursuit. People who work with Dina describe her as a beacon of hope to students. With her vast knowledge of scholarship criteria, she does her best to help students who are facing emergency situations. She’s also a valuable partner for departments throughout campus in their work to get scholarships to students.

This year, Dina was a leader in the complex process of implementing Western’s new Scholarship Portal that will make it easier for students to apply for scholarships at WWU. Dina’s leadership and vast knowledge helped ease campus partners through the transition to see the transformational opportunities that come with a streamlined scholarship application system.

Each day, Dina’s passion and expertise inspires her co-workers and makes a real difference in the lives of students.

Abby Senuty - Career Services Center

As a career counselor, Abby Senuty is passionate about supporting students and alumni as they envision and work toward their future plans. Her professional experiences prior to Western include college access advising and serving as a youth development Peace Corps Volunteer.

Relationships, continual learning, and a strengths-based approach are at the heart of everything she does. She is fortunate to work on a collaborative team that encourages building partnerships beyond the Career Center. Through these collaborations, Abby has supported students in exploring opportunities beyond traditional employment, including curating relevant resources for undocumented and DACA-mented students and partnering with the Blue Resource Center to offer programming about alternative career pathways. A member of the campus-wide Undocu Support Network and the city of Bellingham’s Keep Washington Working Act (KWW) Work Group, Abby advocates for inclusivity and access across Western’s campus and in our broader community.

John Thompson - University Communications

After a career in journalism, John has worked at Western for 18 years as the assistant director of the Office of University Communications, a role which touches almost everything the institution does from a communications perspective: emergency communications, crisis response, issues management, internal communications, media liaison work, and more.  

But in his heart of hearts, John remains a storyteller, and telling Western's story, and that of its incredible students, faculty, and staff, is the favorite part of his job.  
From a heartbreaking, tear-producing conversation with a student who suffered from childhood trauma only to emerge as an Outstanding Graduate, to three life-changing weeks in Ecuador with 21 incredible Honors College students, to the story of how one kind crane operator working on what would become the Interdisciplinary Science Building touched the lives and the imaginations of the tiny scholars in the AS Child Development Center, John seeks to tell stories about Western, and for the Western community, stories that inspire us, move us, and help us to feel proud about the work we do.