The Wartburg College Alumni Board presented Eric Hanson, Lorene “Renie” J. Bunting Lenning and Eric Stahlberg with Alumni Citation Awards during Homecoming & Family Weekend.

Upon graduating from Wartburg in 1996, Hanson’s TV news career began at WEAU-TV in Eau Claire, Wis. He returned to the Cedar Valley as a reporter for KWWL-TV in Waterloo, pulling double-duty for a year as an adjunct professor at his alma mater. In 2000, Eric joined KCCI-TV in Des Moines where he has served as a morning news anchor since 2014. He is most known as the originator of the weekly “This Is Iowa” series that shares the stories of Iowans doing what they do best. Hanson has received five prestigious national Edward R. Murrow awards, five national Society of Professional Journalists awards, a National Headliner award, six Emmys and dozens of regional and statewide honors.

After earning her degree in elementary education in 1964, Lenning taught in Iowa, Colorado and New York before earning her master’s in elementary education from State University of New York at Brockport. In the 1980s, she developed a series of workshops for teachers called Creative Teaching on a Shoestring and a Smile. She authored a book, “More Than Money: An Activities Approach to Economics,” that is credited with giving wider inclusion of money matters in elementary schools. In 2017, she co-authored “Brain Changers 365: Build a Better Brain with 7 Activities Each Day,” drawn from her 40-plus years of creative teaching. Now retired, she is an active volunteer in Tucson, Arizona.

Stahlberg graduated in 1986 with a triple major in chemistry, computer science and mathematics and earned a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in computation chemistry. He worked at the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus and in 2001 began efforts to build statewide capabilities for scientists to use greatly expanded levels of high-performance computing. He was then a computational scientist in residence at Wittenberg University in Ohio before being named director of the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research Bioinformatics Core at Frederick National Laboratory in Maryland. When his sister developed a rare form of cancer in 2012, he saw firsthand the gap between research and the treatments available to cancer patients and led colleagues in collaborating with the Department of Energy, accelerating the progress in precision oncology and computing. He was named the Frederick National Laboratory’s director of biomedical informatics and data science in 2018.

Nominees for the annual award are reviewed based on their personal and professional application of the college’s mission statement pillars: leadership, service, faith and learning.