2026 Chester Gillis Award Winners Embrace Being People for Others

The College of Arts & Sciences celebrated Hallie Sternblitz (C’26) and Matt Gardiner (C’26) as the recipients of the 2026 Chester Gillis Award this past spring. 

Established by the College Academic Council in honor of Chester Gillis, the dean of the College from 2008 to 2017, the annual award recognizes and celebrates up to two students who embody the values of a liberal arts education rooted in the Jesuit tradition.

The College caught up with both recent graduates this summer. Sternblitz has been working remotely in Washington, DC for a Dallas-based law firm and will head to Duke University School of Law this month. Gardiner has been spending time abroad collaborating with indigenous communities on conservation-focused research. 

Learn more about the award winners below.

Hallie Sternblitz (C’26)

For Sternblitz, the Chester Gillis Award emphasizes that a Georgetown education comes with a greater responsibility.

“I was very honored to receive that award,” she said. “We have an obligation to take what we’ve learned here and carry it into the world in service of others, both during our time on the Hilltop and for the rest of our lives.”

This summer, Sternblitz, who graduated in December of 2025 with a B.A. in government and minors in economics and justice and peace studies, has been conducting legal research and assisting in oral arguments as a law clerk for Simon Greenstone Panatier, PC, a trial law firm based in Dallas. Starting this month, she will be attending Duke University School of Law with the goal of eventually becoming a plaintiff-side trial attorney focusing on gender-based violence litigation.

“I want to work with survivors of gender-based violence who are seeking compensation for their damages and losses from abuse,” Sternblitz said.

As she reflected on her Georgetown education, Sternblitz, a Dallas native, said that two experiences come to mind. 

First is the work she did serving as the Arlington County Jail volunteer director on the board of Georgetown Students for Prison Justice. In this role, Sternblitz managed four weekly GED classes for incarcerated individuals and taught social sciences at the jail. Conversing with incarcerated individuals challenged her world view and further fueled her passion for a career in law, Sternblitz said.

The second experience was her time as a victim advocate with Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA). Sternblitz developed skills in trauma-informed communication and built relationships with several long-term clients to ensure their physical, financial and emotional safety.

She said that she is “forever grateful for the opportunities” that Georgetown gave her. Sternblitz credits the mentorship of Department of Government adjunct lecturers Olivia Hinerfeld (SFS’17, L’21) and Zia Faruqui as essential in fueling her academic drive and molding her into the person she is today.  

Sternblitz also credits the Jesuit value of cura personalis, or care of the whole person, as an influence on her life.

“While I’ve learned skills to combat systemic issues like domestic violence and mass incarceration in my Georgetown classes, the larger lesson of cura personalis has taught me these essential soft skills of caring for the people I encounter, and that just listening and showing up for people is really the biggest lesson of all,” she said.

Matt Gardiner (C’26)

At Georgetown, Gardiner said he found a community of professors and peers who supported and encouraged his “radically interdisciplinary education.” 

Gardiner graduated from the College in May with a double major in history and biology, and his time as a Georgetown student took him all over the world, including the coasts of Western Australia, Kenya’s Maasai Mara, the Ecuadorian Andes and the taiga of northern Mongolia.

“As I set out into an equally interdisciplinary — and perhaps equally harebrained — career in research, I am so honored to have Georgetown and the Chester Gillis committee’s backing in my scattered interests,” Gardiner said of receiving the Chester Gillis Award.

This summer, he spent a month in the Peruvian Amazon, working with Brian Griffiths, an assistant teaching professor in the Earth Commons, tracking mammal populations to promote sustainable hunting practices with the Maijuna, a local Indigenous group, and analyzing soil microbial communities for new discoveries in mammal ecology.

Afterward, Gardiner traveled to northern Mongolia, where he is working with NOMAD Science, a nonprofit organization, to salvage looted Bronze Age and Mongol-era archaeological sites in collaboration with Mongolian museums and cultural heritage institutions.

“Both projects work in my focus area: providing remote indigenous communities with the tools to manage their natural and cultural resources how they see fit,” Gardiner said.

This September, he will be attending St. Cross College at the University of Oxford for a master’s degree in human geography. Gardiner hopes to use the degree as a springboard to a Ph.D. program, where he intends to study how communities adapt to environmental change.

Gardiner wants to one day work as a National Geographic Explorer, combining his various interests and academic work in service to others, a value he internalized on the Hilltop. 

“A Georgetown education doesn’t just teach you to talk, but to listen,” Gardiner said. “In all my community-driven fieldwork, that is the first principle I come back to again and again.”