Jane Preyer of Chapel Hill has been elected vice chairwoman of the statewide board of directors of the N.C. Center for Nonprofits.

Preyer is director of the North Carolina Office of the national Environmental Defense Fund. She manages policy and political strategy for a broad range of issues, including air and water quality, clean energy, global warming, and challenges facing the state's coastline and forests.

Preyer played professional tennis and was ranked in the top 50 in the world. As the women's tennis coach at Duke University, she was voted ACC Coach of the Year five times. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and a master's degree in public administration at UNC.

Preyer also has served on the UNC Board of Visitors.

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Eric Montross, Emily Williamson and Eve Carson have been honored by the General Alumni Association of UNC.

Montross, of Chapel Hill, was a member of the 1993 NCAA championship Tar Heels team and former professional player.Williamson, of Hildebran, is vice president of student development at Western Piedmont Community College and Hildebran Town Council member. They received the association's 2009 Distinguished Young Alumni Awards at a banquet earlier this month for bringing credit to the university through their achievements.

The association also made the award posthumously for the first time, to Carson, the student body president from Athens, Ga., who died in March 2008, two months before she was to have graduated. The university subsequently awarded her degree.

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Julia Wood, a professor of communication studies at UNC, has been named the university's first Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education. In the role, Wood will direct the Royster Society of Fellows, outstanding doctoral students with five-year and dissertation fellowships. These Royster Fellowships provide financial support and professional development and learning opportunities.

On Carolina's faculty for 34 years, Wood has published more than 25 books and received 14 awards for scholarship, including being named the Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. Her teaching has earned 13 awards including a Donald Ecroyd Award for Outstanding Teaching in Higher Education and the N.C. Teacher of the Year Award.

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Diane Kelly, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, has been named the American Society of Information Science & Technology's 2009 Thomas Reuters Outstanding Information Science Teacher. Kelly has taught at the school for five years and received its Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 2007.

Letters written by her peers in support of her nomination described Kelly as both "accessible to her students" and "an excellent mentor and role model for them both inside and outside the classroom."

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Claudia Gollop, associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, has been honored by the N.C. Library Association with the 2009 Roundtable for Ethnic and Minority Concerns Roadbuilders' Award in library education. The award recognizes pioneers in librarianship who represent a positive role model in the field and ethnic minority librarians who exemplify courage, integrity and perseverance.

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Inger Brodey of UNC has received the 2009 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Studies Book Award. Brodey is associate professor of English and comparative literature and Asian studies in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences. Brodey won the award for her 2008 book "Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility." The book on landscape gardening and the history of the novel features the work of Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Jane Austen.

At Carolina, Brodey directs undergraduate studies in comparative literature. She won a 2006 UNC Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.