The College of Arts and Sciences is honored to induct the following exceptional alumni and emeriti faculty into the 2026 Alumni Hall of Fame. These are individuals who exemplify the foundational importance of an arts and sciences education and who have made significant contributions to their professions, their communities, and the University of Kentucky.
DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD
Janet M. Norton
B.A. Topical ’78, J.D. ’81
Janet M. Norton of Louisville is the chief legal and regulatory affairs officer, vice president and corporate secretary of Baptist Healthcare System Inc., the largest healthcare system in Kentucky with over $5 billion in revenue. She has responsibility for overseeing legal services, cyber security, government relations and advocacy, compliance, internal audit, risk management and insurance services. Baptist Health is an integrated healthcare system with nine Hospitals; more than 26,000 employees, including 1,600 physicians and advanced clinical practitioners; and over more than 400 locations.
Norton’s 30-plus years of healthcare and legal experience includes serving as interim co-CEO for Baptist Health; prior legal, healthcare and insurance experience at Humana Inc.; appellate legal experience at the Kentucky Court of Appeals; and oversight of federal and state grants and loans through the Commonwealth of Kentucky Development Cabinet.
In addition to serving as an officer and advising more than 30 Baptist Health entity boards of directors, including foundations, Norton also serves as a director of a Captive Insurance Co. and the Kentucky Institute of Patient Safety and Quality and sits on the Advisory Board of St. Joseph’s Home of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Ms. Norton earned her B.A. with high distinction from UK’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1978. Her area of study was American social, economic and political institutions. She earned her J.D. with distinction from the University of Kentucky College of Law and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Kentucky Law Journal. She and her husband, Bill, have five adult children.
DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD
William F. Schweri II
B.A. Anthropology ’69, M.A. Anthropology ’78
William Schweri served as the first director of federal relations in the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Kentucky before retiring in 2015. In his role as director of federal relations, he worked as a registered lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He was responsible for over $200 million in direct appropriations. Schweri served on numerous national boards representing the Commonwealth and University’s interests. More recently, he served on the Arts and Sciences Capital Campaign Committee and currently serves on the Arts and Sciences Leadership Advisory Board.
Schweri served as the UK director of the Office of Sponsored Program Development from 1984 to 2004, and in July of 1994 he took on additional duties as director of Federal Relations. He worked in research administration for 37 years and at UK for 42 years. Before his research administration career, he worked for five years as a research associate at the Center for Developmental Change, a multidisciplinary social science research center at UK. He served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala, speaks Spanish and has a BA (1969) and MA (1978) in anthropology from the University of Kentucky. When he is not in an airplane traveling, he enjoys fishing, cooking and wine collecting.
He has been a member of the Society of Research Administrators International since 1978 and served as president of the professional association. He was a member of the society’s Distinguished Faculty and received the society’s Excellence Award in 2006 and the Herbert B. Chermside Award for Distinguished Contribution to Research Administration in 2015. Schweri was the first recipient of the society’s Partnership Award for International Collaboration in 2016.
Schweri was an aggressive advocate for professional development and education in research administration. His Society of Research Administrators International activities included serving as a member of the International Committee and managing the society's partnership programs with the University of Puerto Rico and the Ponce School of Medicine.
Schweri lives in Lexington with his wife, Laurie (B.A. English '71, J.D. '78), a former partner in the law firm of Stites & Harbison.
DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD
William Barry Lee
B.S. Biology ’94, M.D. ’98
Dr. W. Barry Lee, M.D, FACS, is a physician partner at Eye Consultants of Atlanta and Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta. He has practiced ophthalmology for more than 24 years, specializing in corneal transplantation, complex cataract surgery and LASIK vision correction.
A native of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Lee earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in biological sciences with a minor in chemistry from the UK College of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He completed medical school and residency training at the UK Medical Center, followed by a cornea transplant fellowship at U.C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California. Lee has devoted his career to restoring sight through corneal transplant surgery and has performed and taught advanced surgical techniques worldwide.
Lee’s leadership roles include serving as president of the Georgia Society of Ophthalmology and president of the Cornea Society, the largest organization of corneal transplant surgeons, representing members from 52 countries. Since 2009, he has served as medical director of the Georgia Eye Bank, which provides all corneal tissue for transplantation in Georgia. He also directs the Atlanta-based cornea fellowship program, having trained 23 surgical fellows in corneal transplantation.
A graduate of the Leadership Development Program of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, Lee has received both the academy’s Senior Achievement Award and the Secretariat Service Award. He has served on the Board of Directors and as chair of Accreditation for the Eye Bank Association of America, the organization responsible for overseeing all corneal transplants in the United States. In recognition of his contributions to eye banking, corneal transplant surgery and surgical education, he received the eye bank’s highest honor, the R. Townley Paton Award.
Lee has been selected annually as a Castle Connolly Top Doctor since 2007 and was named by Newsweek as one of America’s Top 150 Eye Doctors. Internationally, he has received Italy’s SICSSO Honor Award, India’s Gold Medal Lecture Award and Brazil’s “Walk of Fame Star” at Sorocaba Eye Hospital in São Paulo. He is also co-editor of the textbook “Ocular Surface Disease: Cornea, Conjunctiva, and Tear Film.”
BRIGHT FUTURES LEADERSHIP AWARD
Hannah Haksgaard
B.A. Political Science ’09, B.A. Topical in Gender and Women’s Studies ’09
Hannah Haksgaard is a professor at the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, where she teaches in the areas of property law and family law. She writes on those topics as well as the rural lawyer shortage. Her most recent project is a book called “The Rural Lawyer: How to Incentivize Rural Law Practice and Help Small Communities Thrive” (Cambridge University Press; 2025). Haksgaard received her B.A. from the University of Kentucky and her J.D. from Berkeley Law. After law school, she clerked for the Hon. Roberto Lange at the District of South Dakota and the Hon. Kermit Bye at the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Although Haksgaard lives in South Dakota, she was born in Kentucky into a family that has been in Leslie County since the late 1700s.
EMERITI FACULTY AWARD
Department of Chemistry
Steven W. Yates is a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Kentucky, where he taught and conducted research for nearly five decades. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Missouri-Columbia and his doctorate in nuclear chemistry from Purdue University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined the UK faculty as an assistant professor in 1975, was promoted to associate professor and tenured in 1979, and then promoted to full professor in 1985. He served as director of the University of Kentucky Accelerator Laboratory starting in 1995 and was chair of the Department of Chemistry from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2014-2015. In 2004, he accepted a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He retired in 2023.
In the late 1970s, Yates began well-known experiments at UK’s Van de Graaff accelerator which led to recognizing and developing the spectroscopic power of the inelastic neutron scattering reaction. A leading scholar in nuclear structure and spectroscopy, Yates and his team produced landmark findings on collective excitations in nuclei and in recent years expanded the scope of his nuclear structure studies to address some of the most impactful topics in neutrino and particle physics. He is the author or co-author of more than 300 publications and served as associate editor of the Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry. Over his career, he mentored 17 doctoral students and more than a dozen postdoctoral scholars, many of whom have gone on to leadership positions in nuclear science.
A consummate university citizen, Yates chaired the Arts and Sciences Council three times and was the first chair of its successor, the Arts and Sciences Executive Committee. For years he chaired Chemistry’s Alumni Relations Committee, ensuring that donors received personal thank you notes and spearheading the first Chemistry alumni reunion in 2015. His contributions to teaching, research, and service have been recognized with numerous honors, including the American Chemical Society’s Glenn T. Seaborg Award for Nuclear Chemistry, the highest international award in the fields of nuclear chemistry and radiochemistry. He was named University Research Professor in 1992 and received the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Award for 1993-94, the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1992, and the William B. Sturgill Award for outstanding contributions to graduate education in 1994. He is a Fellow of both the American Chemical Society and the American Physical Society.