• Chapel Hill students Preetha Nandi and Michael Lo have been awarded the Siemens Award For Advanced Placement for their exceptional performance within Advanced Placement courses.

Nandi, 17, attends East Chapel Hill High School and Lo, 17, attends Chapel Hill High School.

For the past 10 years the Siemens Foundation has been recognizing up to 100 students a year, one male and one female from each state with a $2,000 college scholarship for their excellence in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.

• Lindsay Woodhouse, daughter of David and Andrea Woodhouse of Carrboro, received academic honors at Queens University of Charlotte.

• Irene Rose Wolf, an international studies and communications studies major at Hollins University, has been named an Honor Student for the 2008 fall semester.

• Margaret Blackwell, executive director of exceptional children and student services in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, received the Felix S. Barker Award at the annual conference for the North Carolina Council of Exceptional Children on Feb. 5.

The Barker award recognizes individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in the field of special education.

Blackwell has worked in the field of special education since 1977.

In 1997, she joined the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in her current position. Before that, Blackwell worked for Guilford County Schools for 20 years, where she was named Teacher of the Year for Eastern Guilford High School. During that time, she was an LD/EM resource teacher, an EC program facilitator and a diagnostician.

Over the years, Blackwell has also held various offices with the NC CEC, including president, vice president, secretary and treasurer.

Blackwell holds a bachelor's degree from UNC-Greensboro in Elementary Education and a master's degree in Special Education from UNC-Chapel Hill.

• Taylor Williams, daughter of Todd and Dawn Williams and a 2006 graduate of Chapel Hill High School, was recently chosen president of the East Carolina University Panhellenic Council. She will preside over the entire sorority system at ECU and will receive a full year of paid tuition.

Williams is a junior at ECU, where she is majoring in broadcast journalism. She is an ECU Ambassador, a member of Alpha Omicron Pi, a member of the Dean's List and a National Collegiate Scholar. She was also nominated for the Homecoming Court and recently completed an internship for the ABC-TV affiliate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

• Scott Conary, owner of Carrboro Coffee Co., Open Eye Cafe & Caffe Driade, completed and passed the World Barista Championship Judges Certification course/workshop on Jan. 12 in Long Beach, Calif.

He became one of only 13 judges who passed in the U.S. and Canada training, and is now one of only seven from the United States certified to judge the World Barista Championship to be held this April in Atlanta, Ga.

Thirty judges participated in the two-day course that put entrants through rigorous testing to evaulate their abilities.

Conary has judged at the last three WBC competitions. He has been active in judging since 2003, when he judged at the first Southeast Regional copmpetition at A Southern Season's cooking classroom in Chapel Hill.

All Barista competitions worldwide reward demonstrated excellence in the art and skill of preparing and serving espresso. Entrants must make 12 beverages, including four espressos, four cappuccinos and four original signature drinks of their own creation within 15 minutes in front of a panel of certified industry judges.

Competitors are judged on taste, beverage presentation, technical skills, coffee knowledge and passion, and overall impression.

• Karen Erickson, director of the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies in the UNC School of Medicine, has been selected as the first David E. and Dolores J. (Dee) Yoder Distinguished Professor in Literacy and Disability Studies in the school's allied health sciences department.

The Yoder Distinguished Professorship was established through a gift from Maynard and Carolyn Sauder of Archbold, Ohio, as a tribute to the professionalism, teaching and research of David E. Yoder and the support of his wife, Dee.

Yoder established the UNC Center for Literacy and Disability Studies in 1988 to help address concerns he first developed early in his career as a speech-language pathologist that many people with significant communication disorders lacked the one skill that would allow them to communicate fully with others -- literacy.

Erickson directs several research and development efforts addressing the literacy, learning and communication needs of people with disabilities.

Her current research efforts involve school-aged students who struggle to read and write or who have complex communication needs, and children, adolescents and young adults with multiple disabilities, including deaf-blindness.