Dr. Rick Dierenfeldt and Erica Holmes Trujillo are recipients of 2025 UT System President’s Awards. Individual photos by Angela Foster. Awards photo courtesy of UT System.
Two University of Tennessee at Chattanooga standouts, UC Foundation Associate Professor Rick Dierenfeldt and College of Arts and Sciences Student Success Center Director Erica Holmes Trujillo, have been named recipients of the 2025 UT System President’s Awards—the highest honor a faculty or staff member can receive from the UT System.
UT System President Randy Boyd announced the award-winning faculty and staff selections from across the statewide UT System during the just-completed annual UT Board of Trustees meeting held on the UTC campus.
“These awards celebrate the dedication and remarkable work of our faculty and staff throughout the state,” Boyd said in the UT System announcement. “Their contributions create a better University of Tennessee and also impact the state and far beyond. Each play an important role as we continue building the greatest decade in UT history.”
Dierenfeldt, head of UTC’s Department of Criminal Justice, was selected in the “Optimistic and Visionary” category. Holmes Trujillo earned recognition in the “Nimble and Innovative” category.
They will be formally recognized in person at the One UT Cabinet Retreat on August 7 in Nashville.
UC Foundation Associate Professor Rick Dierenfeldt
A former law enforcement officer turned academic changemaker, Dierenfeldt is the founder and director of UTC’s Violence Reduction Initiative (VRI), a research and policy center focused on public safety, firearm violence prevention and community-centered crime intervention.
He first rose to national attention as co-lead of the Chattanooga Police Department’s federally funded Crime Gun Intelligence Center (CGIC), which resulted in a 27% decrease in firearm homicides, a 36% drop in overall homicides, and a 42% decline in shooting victims. The CGIC effort received the national Excellence in Crime Gun Intelligence Award from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The success of that project sparked the idea for a broader UTC-based initiative to centralize data-driven criminal justice research, inform policy and train the next generation of public safety leaders. Dierenfeldt’s response was the Violence Reduction Initiative—launched with minimal overhead and a strategic plan for long-term, grant-based sustainability.
Since its founding, the VRI has earned major federal grants through collaborations with the City of Chattanooga and Hamilton County Alternative Sentencing Programs. These include the nearly $2 million CURV project (Chattanooga United to Reduce Violence) and the $844,000 Recidivism Reduction Initiative. Both efforts aim to prevent future violence through community partnerships, after-school engagement, trauma-informed care and embedded student research support.
“This centralization of the department’s efforts in partnering with area law enforcement and justice agencies has led to a swift influx of federal money to study violence in the Chattanooga community,” said Dr. Pam Riggs-Gelasco, dean of the UTC College of Arts and Sciences. “These efforts build on his own successes over the past nine years that have led to notable improvements in the levels of violence in the community.”
Dierenfeldt’s applied research model has led to more than 30 co-authored student publications, direct influence on CPD policy and expanded UTC visibility in regional and national criminal justice networks.
“The message from President Boyd was extremely humbling,” Dierenfeldt said. “It isn’t the sort of notification you expect to receive, especially when there are so many amazing innovations constantly being introduced across this campus. The caliber of work being performed is just so high. But that is also what makes this award so meaningful. It is a reminder that what we are doing in Criminal Justice—the partnerships we are building, the research we are producing, the effort to have a positive impact within the community—all of it is seen and valued. Every bit of that work has been a team effort involving everyone from student researchers and fellow faculty to communications staff and campus administrators.
“Putting ideas on paper is the easy part. Putting them into action cannot happen without the support of other people, something that almost always requires significant investments of time and energy. I am very proud of the work we do at UTC, and I am incredibly grateful for the daily opportunities I’m given to work with and alongside the remarkable staff, faculty and administrators who call this University home.”
Erica Holmes Trujillo
As director of the College of Arts and Sciences Student Success Center, better known as The Hub, Holmes Trujillo has reshaped the way UTC supports transfer students—a vital student population.
She launched “Soar with the Mocs: Supporting Transfers from First through Final Flight,” a multifaceted initiative aimed at improving enrollment yield, persistence and graduation rates for transfer students. Through a blend of peer mentorship, direct communication and personalized outreach campaigns, she developed a proof of concept for a scalable, campuswide approach to supporting transfer student success by addressing an institutional gap with sustainable solutions.
Holmes Trujillo’s impact has been both strategic and deeply personal. From orchestrating high-impact transfer social events to eliminating bureaucratic friction with user-friendly petition and override systems, her innovations have resulted in dramatic improvements. The yield rate for spring 2025 transfer admits hit 72%—a substantial jump from prior years.
“In everything she does, Erica tries to remove barriers to success for our students,” Riggs-Gelasco said. “This single arching principle helps align her work for maximum impact. Through her work and her colleagues in The Hub, CAS has increased its four-year graduation rate by 11%.”
In addition to her leadership on transfer student success and her role as co-director of the Integrated Studies program, Holmes Trujillo has driven numerous advising-related improvements for UTC’s largest college. She created advising guides for every major, led website overhauls, reengineered study abroad and general education petitions, and helped departments rethink enrollment forecasting, bottleneck courses and curricular barriers.
Her broader mission, she said, has focused on establishing a central space where students from all majors and all backgrounds receive consistent, high-quality advising support.
“When I arrived at UTC in 2019, we had a small staff and a big idea—creating a centralized support system that ensured every Arts and Sciences student, no matter their major, had access to meaningful, professional guidance,” Holmes Trujillo said. “Over time, we have built a team of advisors whose role is not just answering questions but helping students navigate the institution with confidence. We want each student to feel supported and we’ve achieved that without losing the unique identity of our programs. That’s what makes this work so rewarding.”
Holmes Trujillo said her passion for supporting transfer students stems from a career spent at institutions serving a broad range of nontraditional learners.
“Transfer students arrive eager, determined and ready to succeed—and we see firsthand what barriers they’ve already overcome,” she said. “UTC has all the right pieces to support them, and we’ve worked to put those pieces in the right places.
“For me, it goes back to why I entered higher education in the first place. Education changes lives. It’s one thing that no one can ever take away.”
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Photo courtesy of UT System
The President’s Awards were established in 2016 to annually honor UT faculty and staff whose work advances the University’s Be One UT values:
- Bold and Impactful
- Embrace Diversity
- Optimistic and Visionary
- Nimble and Innovative
- Excel in All We Do
- United and Connected
- Transparent and Trusted
Honorees are chosen from a system-wide pool of candidates nominated by campus and institute leaders. Each winner receives a commemorative plaque inspired by the University of Tennessee president’s medallion and a monetary award of $3,000.
In addition to UTC, this year’s recipients represent UT Knoxville, UT Southern, UT Martin, UT Health Science Center, UT Institute for Agriculture, UT Institute for Public Service, and the UT Space Institute in Tullahoma, a part of UT Knoxville.
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