The Alumnae Association will award Wellesley’s highest honor—the Alumnae Achievement Awards—in front of a much larger audience this year. The award ceremony has been shifted to Oct. 14, part of the College’s Very Wellesley Weekend. On campus and invited to the ceremony will be parents attending Family and Friends Weekend, alumnae attending Alumnae Leadership Council, and athletes and supporters of Wellesley athletics attending Homecoming and the Athletics Hall of Fame induction ceremony. The 2016 recipients will be:

Maria Morris Hambourg Barlow ’71

Maria Morris Hambourg Barlow is a highly regarded art historian and curator. Her championing of photography led to the creation, in 1992, of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with her as curator. She assisted the Met in acquiring the John C. Waddell collection of about 500 interwar avant-garde photographs and the entire Gilman Paper Company Collection of photographs—both now central to the museum’s photographic holdings.

Barlow’s work has captivated the attention of artists, curators, and art connoisseurs worldwide. Her publications include The Work of Atget; The Waking Dream: Photography’s First Century (Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection); and Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949–50. Barlow serves on the board of directors of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

Marian Fox Burros ’54

Marian Fox Burros has been a transformative influence in American writing about food, food safety, health, and agriculture, both as a cookbook author and a journalist.

Burros has shown a knack for adapting complicated restaurant recipes for home chefs. With titles like Elegant But Easy (written with Lois Liebeskind Levine ’52) and Cooking for Comfort, her books conveyed a message that cuisine didn’t have to be dauntingly complex to be delicious.

Burros has focused on food on the public agenda, as well. She made her mark early on as an advocate for healthier, more sustainable eating. A longtime food reporter and columnist for the New York Times, she was previously the food editor of the Washington Post.

Debra Knopman ’75

During her career, Debra Knopman has wrestled with some of the biggest challenges facing humanity today: nuclear-waste management, environmental restoration, and long-term water resources planning, for example. Today, she is a principal researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, with expertise in policy as well as science.

She has served both in government (in the U.S. Geological Survey as a research hydrologist, in the U.S. Department of the Interior as deputy assistant secretary for water and science, and in the U.S. Senate, as a staff member) and in the private sector (the Progressive Policy Institute and RAND). From 1997 to 2003, she served on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.