Emily Couric, a two-term Virginia State Senator, had just embarked upon a statewide campaign for Lieutenant Governor when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, to which she eventually succumbed. While undergoing treatment for her disease, she continued representing her constituents in the 25th District and was elected to serve as General Chair of the Democratic Party in Virginia.
Widely regarded as a rising star in Virginia politics, experts predicted Senator Couric would have been elected the first woman to serve as Governor of Virginia.
A strong advocate for public education and health care issues, she championed bills establishing the Advanced Mathematics and Technology Diploma Seal for high school graduates, supporting research and rehabilitation for victims of spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries, and mandating insurance coverage for colorectal cancer screening. She received numerous awards for her work in the General Assembly.
Throughout her life, Emily Couric epitomized a passionate commitment to continuous learning and public service. She dedicated much of her time serving on many Charlottesville-area community boards. One of her last projects was to establish the Emily Couric Leadership Scholarships, as a way to honor and inspire young women in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. An inspiration with her grace, warmth, intelligence, and courage, Emily motivated young people to embrace civic involvement. She lost her battle with cancer just a few months after our first luncheon honoring her and the local high school senior women leaders.
Click on video about Emily below.
Emily Couric Women’s Leadership Award Recipients
2024 Judy Woodruff
Judy Woodruff is an Emmy Award winning broadcast journalist and the Senior Correspondent for the PBS Newshour
Past Women’s Leadership Award Recipients
The Women’s Leadership Award acknowledges an exceptional woman each year who exemplifies leadership in her profession and her community. The recipient offers the keynote address and presents the Emily Couric Leadership Scholarship to an outstanding female high school senior selected for demonstrated leadership in her school and community.
2022 Sonja Hoel Perkins
“Investing in a way that everyone wins” inspires the career of Charlottesville native Sonja Hoel Perkins (Albemarle High School, UVA McIntire ’88). After nearly three decades of venture capital investment success at Menlo Ventures and TA Associates, Ms. Perkins founded The Perkins Fund concentrating on “people and companies that matter.” She became part of the C200, Women Moving Millions and The Maverick Collective. Ms. Perkins established Broadway Angels, a venture capital group of world class investors who all happen to be women, and Project Glimmer. Project Glimmer inspires every girl to envision and realize her full potential through its “Gifts and Goods” programs, “Days of Empowerment” and coaching. Her story is featured in Julian Guthrie’s book Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley’s Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime.
2020-2021 Dr. Vivian Pinn
Dr. Vivian Winona Pinn is an American physician, scientist, and pathologist known for her advocacy of women's health issues and concerns, particularly for ensuring that federally funded medical studies include female patients, as well as encouraging women to follow medical and scientific careers.
2019 Dr. Deborah McCauley
Dr. McCauley is a wildlife veterinarian and founded VIEW in response to the growing threat of disease transmitted by domestic animals and humans to endangered wildlife.
Dr. McCauley has been extensively involved with wildlife disease surveillance, wildlife capture and immobilization, field surgery, field research, disease prevention and response. She has participated in wildlife field capture in North America, Africa and Asia and has worked with wildlife organizations including the Wildlife Conservation Society, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, and ZooMontana.
2018 Emily K. Rafferty
Emily Kernan Rafferty is President Emerita of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She served for 40 years as Chief of Institutional Advancement, Senior Vice President of External Affairs, and as President from 2005 to 2015. In that capacity, she was the Museum’s Chief Administrative Officer, supervising a staff of some 2,000 full- and part-time employees and volunteers and working with some 50 countries and world leaders on behalf of the Museum.
Currently, she serves as Chair of NYC & Company (the city’s tourism, marketing, and partnering organization), as a board member of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and continues as an advisor to the Smithsonian for the advancement of the Women’s Initiative project.
2017 Val Ackerman
Val Ackerman has risen to the pinnacle at every level of sports. She was one of the first female athletes to receive an athletic scholarship from UVA. She was Vice-President of Business Affairs for the NBA. She was named the first President of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), served as president of USA Basketball, and spent eight years as the U.S. representative to the International Basketball Federation. In 2016, she was presented with the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Billie Jean King Contribution Award.
Today, Ackerman leads the Big East Conference as Commissioner of ten universities. A natural leader who exemplifies the perfect balance of business savvy and sports innovation, Ackerman remains a steadfast champion for women’s sports.
2016 Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni, named one of Oprah Winfrey’s 25 “Living Legends,” is a writer, commentator, activist, educator, and among the most celebrated poets of our time.
She has published more than 30 books, including three New York Times and Los Angeles Times Best Sellers. She has been honored with an unprecedented seven NAACP Image Awards and was the first recipient of the Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award. She received the Langston Hughes Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, has been nominated for a Grammy in the category of Spoken Word, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
She is currently the University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she has taught since 1987.
2015 Dr. Sylvia Earle
Dr. Sylvia Earle is President and Chairman of Mission Blue / The Sylvia Earle Alliance. She is a National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence, and is called “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times, “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, and “First Hero for the Planet” by Time Magazine. She is an oceanographer, explorer, author and lecturer with experience as a field research scientist, government official, and director for several corporate and non-profit organizations.
2014 Tina Brown
Tina Brown is an award-winning journalist, editor, author and currently founder and CEO of Tina Brown Live Media. TBLM launched the annual Women in the World Summit in 2010. The summit convenes extraordinary leaders, inspirational activists and political change-makers from all over the world to share stories and offer solutions to build a better life for women and girls. Prior to this, Brown launched and edited the award-winning digital news site, The Daily Beast with Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, and has been the editor-in-chief of Tatier, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk and Newsweek.
2013 Senator Olympia Snowe
Senator Olympia Snowe was the U.S. Senator for Maine from 1995-2013. She was the first woman in American history to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress. Her dedicated work in the U.S. Senate has garnered her nationwide recognition, including being named the 54th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine in 2005.
2012 Maureen Orth
Maureen Orth is an award-winning journalist, a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, and the founder of the Marina Orth Foundation. Her foundation promotes advanced learning in technology and English at The Marina Orth School (Escuela Marina Orth) in Medellin, Colombia, as well as a second rural school outside the city. Orth first helped to build her namesake school in the 60s as a Peace Corps volunteer.
2011 Melanne Verveer
Melanne Verveer served as United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues from 2009-2013. She was also Chair and Co-CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international nonprofit she co-founded. Vital Voices invests in emerging women leaders and works to expand women’s roles in generating economic opportunity, promoting political participation, and safeguarding human rights. Prior to her work with Vital Voices, Ambassador Verveer served as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady in the Clinton Administration.
2010 Anna Quindlen
Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, began her career at the age of 18 as a copy girl for the New York Post. Later, at the New York Times, she became the third woman in the paper’s history to write for its influential Op-Ed page. Quindlen has authored numerous books providing insight into issues ranging from literacy and education to work and social justice, medical ethics, and family values.
2009 Kimberly Dozier
Kimberly Dozier is an award-winning news correspondent with a strong interest in the Middle East. Her recently published memoir, Breathing the Fire, Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq, details her inspiring recovery from the car bomb that hit her team while covering a 4th ID patrol in Baghdad in May 2006. She now covers the White House and Pentagon as a general assignment reporter for CBS’s Washington, DC bureau.
2008 Erin Gruwell
Erin Gruwell currently serves as President of the Freedom Writers Foundation, a non-profit organization striving to positively impact communities by decreasing high school drop out rates through the replication and enhancement of the Freedom Writer Method. Erin’s student journals and her narrative text is collected and published in the Freedom Writers Diary – How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves & the World Around Them.
2007 Lesley Visser
Lesley Visser today is lauded as arguably the finest and most versatile female sports writer and broadcaster in history. She is the only sportscaster, male or female, who has worked on the network broadcast of the Final Four, Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals, Triple Crown, Olympics, U.S. Open and World Figure Skating Championship.
2006 Donna Brazile
Donna Brazile was the first African American to lead a major presidential campaign and contributes as a print television political commentator. She chairs the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute and is managing director of Brazile and Associates LLC.
2005 Caroline Kennedy
Caroline Kennedy is Vice Chairman of the Fund for Public Schools in New York City, which creates and develops public-private partnerships to support public education. She is an attorney and the author/editor of best-selling books on topics ranging from poetry to American history.
2004 Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman named to the Supreme Court of the United States and served as an Associate Justice from 1981 to 2006. She previously worked as a deputy county attorney in California, as assistant attorney general in Arizona, and Arizona State Senator for multiple terms.
2003 Rita Dove
In 1993, Rita Dove was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, the youngest person and the first African-American to receive this highest official honor in American letters. She earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and is now the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
2002 Katie Couric
Katie Couric is an award winning journalist, producer, New York Times bestselling author, cancer advocate, podcast host and documentary filmmaker. She was co-anchor of the Today Show on NBC for 15 years before going to CBS and becoming the first woman anchor of a nightly news broadcast. After CBS, Katie moved to serve as the Global News Anchor at Yahoo News, where she interviewed prominent political and cultural figures and covered breaking news. In 2015, Katie founded Katie Couric Media, her production company which centers around scripted and non-scripted projects that are committed to creating smart, trustworthy, relatable content that aims to tell the stories that need to be brought to awareness.
2024 Women’s Leadership Award Winner
Judy Woodruff
Judy Woodruff is an Emmy Award winning broadcast journalist and the Senior Correspondent for the PBS Newshour. As the former Anchor and Managing Editor of the PBS NewsHour, she and the late Gwen Ifill were named the first two women to co-anchor a national news broadcast. Her five-decade career, covering politics and twelve presidential elections, led her to launch in 2023 “America at a Crossroads”, a two-year reporting project to understand America’s political divide.
For 12 years Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN. At NBC News, Woodruff was White House Correspondent (1977-1982), and after that servedoneyearasNBC’sTodayshowChiefWashingtonCorrespondent. Sheisthe author of This is Judy Woodruff at the White House, published in 1982
During her early years at PBS, she was Chief Washington Correspondent for The MacNeil/Lahrer NewsHour (1983-1993). She also anchored Frontline with Judy Woodruff (1984-1990). In 2011 Woodruff was the principal reporter for the PBS Documentary, Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.
Woodruff was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award, the Poynter Medal, an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement in TelevisionNewsandtheRadcliffeMedal. TogethersheandthelateGwenIfillwere awarded Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Additionally, Woodruff is a founding co-chair of the International Women's Media Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting women in communications worldwide. She is a graduate of Duke University where she is a Trustee Emerita. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, journalist Al Hunt; they are the parents of three children.