ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University faculty members Linda Rayor and John Weiss have been named 2005 winners of the Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Service-Learning Award. The annual award, which comes with a $5,000 purse for each recipient, recognizes the winners' involvement with service-learning projects that actively involve Cornell students in research, teaching and outreach efforts addressing important community-identified policy issues. It is given by Cornell's Public Service Center.

Rayor, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology, was recognized for her development and proposed expansion of the Cornell Naturalists Outreach Program. 

She teaches the courses Spider Biology and Insect Behavior and studies social dynamics in the unusual Australian spiders that were the "stars" of the movie "Arachnophobia." She and her students run the "Spider Outreach Program: Eight-legged Ambassadors for Science Education" -- talks by Cornell students about the biology of spiders and insects in local schools and the community.

Weiss, an associate professor in the Department of History, was recognized for his proposed service-learning component of a course on international humanitarianism. 

He teaches courses on 20th-century Europe and World War II and has published studies on the legacies of anti-Fascist resistance. A past director of Cornell's Institute for European Studies, he is coordinator of the French studies program. With his wife, Elaine, he produced the video "Stopping Genocide: Darfur (Sudan) 2004." During the war in Bosnia he delivered medical supplies and other aid items to two cities there, and he now works with Bosnian teachers on the public memory of the war.

The awards were presented May 5 by Cornell alumna Barbara Kaplan '59, who endowed the program, along with her family. The occasion was a dinner at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art following the 2005 Kaplan Family Distinguished Lecture in Public Service by Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, a human rights activist from Iran, who also was honored at the dinner.