Three West Virginia University advisors recently earned recognition from the National Association for Academic Advising in the organization's 2026 awards cycle.
Cathy Manley, an academic advisor for health and well-being majors in the College of Applied Human Sciences, was named one of three national recipients of NACADA’s Outstanding New Advisor Award.
Joy Carr, director of University Advising in the Office of the Provost, received the Service to the Region Award from NACADA's Region 3, which covers Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Semoa DeSousa-Brown, a senior academic advisor in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, received Region 3's Advising Excellence Award – Advisor. Carr and DeSousa-Brown will be honored at the 2027 Region 3 Conference.
Manley's students posted the highest satisfaction scores of any cohort in her college on WVU's 2025 advising survey, and retention among her first-time freshman cohort rose from 74% in 2023 to 78% in 2024. She helped design WVU's first new-advisor onboarding module and now serves on a committee that trains more than 200 advisors across WVU's three-campus system.
Manley has presented at WVU's state advising conference and twice at NACADA's national conference, and this year served on a panel and the planning committee for the NACADA Region 3/4 conference. Since starting at WVU in 2024, she has won institutional meritorious recognition as both a new advisor and a First-Year Seminar instructor, a distinction WVU has not previously awarded to the same person.
Carr's Service to the Region Award is a new award this year that recognizes leadership across an entire NACADA region rather than a single campus – a bar few nominees clear, as most regions across the country left the award unfilled in its first cycle. In her four years as director of University Advising, Carr founded West Virginia's first free, statewide academic advising conference, which drew more than 150 attendees at its 2023 launch and has repeated annually. She created a statewide new-advisor onboarding resource now used as a model by other institutions and coordinated transportation for WVU advisors to attend NACADA's 2024 national conference in Pittsburgh, drawing the highest advisor turnout WVU has recorded at a national conference. NACADA membership in West Virginia, which has fewer than 90 members statewide, has grown 35 percent during her tenure, and the state now holds more NACADA regional leadership positions than any other state in Region 3.
DeSousa-Brown has served as the primary advisor for WVU's Regents Bachelor of Arts program, a completion degree for nontraditional learners, since 2016. The program currently enrolls 179 students at WVU, one of 10 participating institutions statewide; roughly 3,200 RBA degrees have been conferred across those institutions in the past five years. Over the past three years, DeSousa-Brown's advising has contributed to a 48% share of all completion-degree graduates coming through the RBA program, representing just under 300 students. A university "recruit back" campaign she helped lead in 2024-25 identified completion pathways for roughly 20 additional students who had previously stopped out.