The Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics unveiled its 2012 “Women Impacting ISU” calendar Thursday to celebrate 12 women who have gone above and beyond in serving the ISU community.

This year, the honorees were Sharon Bird, Joy Ensley, Molly Heintz, Aja Holmes, Kathleen Jones, Ahna Kruzic, Susan Lammers, Alejandra Navarro, Kayla Nielsen, Shelley Taylor, Ann Thompson and Jingtao Wang.

The women are a combination of students, faculty and staff at Iowa State.

Julie Snyder-Yuly, assistant director of the Catt Center, said the calendar was created in 2007 after students got the idea from the University of Kansas. Its main purpose is to celebrate women on campus who do work behind the scenes, but deserve to be publicly recognized and appreciated.

“This is a good way to let people know some of the cool things that people are doing at all levels,” Snyder-Yuly said.

The Catt Center was flooded with more than 40 nominations for women to receive this award. The problem is that there are only 12 months in a year, so only 12 women can be featured in the calendar.

“It was a process,” said Laura Wentworth, senior in journalism and mass communication.

Wentworth works as a public relations intern for the Catt Center and served on the committee for choosing the best candidates. Wentworth said each nomination letter was reviewed by three different people and then narrowed down.

Once the nominations were narrowed down, the committee reviewed each of them. They chose the top 12 women based on “how well-written the nomination letters were and how well the person contributed to Iowa State,” Wentworth said.

At the ceremony, the award recipients received high praise from the audience.

“It’s something I never expected,” said Heintz, a senior in animal science and pre-veterinary medicine, of the award.

Women who are students, faculty and staff can all be nominated for the honor. To nominate a woman, a paper has to be written about why the candidate deserves to be on the calendar, and at least one other person must write a letter in support of the nomination. Information on how to nominate someone for next year can be found at the Catt Center’s website.