The former U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands and a respected reporter, Geri Joseph has won several prizes for her journalistic and volunteer work. But her first award was from an all-male journalism fraternity, given at an award ceremony in which she was the "first, and only, woman in a room full of men," an experience that "prepared [her] for many of the other 'firsts' and 'only' times that [she] would experience.”

Institution: Geri Joseph