Professor Noha Shawki is the recipient of the 2023 Environmental Stewardship Award, which the Office of Sustainability awards at ISU. The award recognizes individuals, groups, units, or programs for their work in advancing sustainability at ISU. Noha Shawki was recognized for her efforts to develop programs that educate students about sustainability and sustainable development.

Over many years, Professor Shawki has incorporated sustainable development issues into different classes and developed a variety of immersive programs that focus on sustainability, sustainable development, food justice, and global justice. Together with students, she has traveled domestically and internationally on experiential learning trips that she designed as part of independent study projects focusing on these issues.

Most recently, she traveled with students in fall 2022 to Sweden to attend World Water Week. World Water Week is a global event that brings together government officials and individuals from international organizations, civil society, and the private sector to address global water issues and their relevance to food and agriculture, energy, human rights, peace, and other global challenges. She also traveled with students in the fall of 2022 to attend Terra Madre, a global gathering of Slow Food movement participants working to make the global food system more socially just, biodiverse, and climate-resilient. After a hiatus necessitated by the pandemic, she is getting ready to resume a fair trade program that started in 2017 and to travel back to Costa Rica with Professor Julian Westerhout and a group of 12 students to study fair trade and the fair trade movement.

Additionally, Professor Shawki was among a small group of faculty who worked jointly to create the Center for a Sustainable Water Future and the Water Sustainability minor and has been involved in other sustainability-focused efforts at ISU.