The Auburn Alumni Association celebrated its 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) recipients and Young Alumni Achievement Award (YAA) recipient at a gala June 7 at the Gogue Performing Arts Center.
Douglas Meckes, Raymond J. Harbert, Sonny Smith and Susan Nolen Story were named LAA recipients while Kirsty Coventry received the YAA award, given to alumni under the age of 40. The black-tie event featured videos and photos of the honorees and recipients spoke of their lives and love of Auburn.
Susan Nolen Story ’81
Industrial Engineering
Susan Nolen Story ’81 industrial and systems engineering, is a first-generation college student who grew up in Albertville, Alabama. Her career began at Southern Company in 1982, when she joined as a junior engineer with an Alabama Power Company nuclear plant. Over the next 20 years, she served in various management and executive roles within Alabama Power Company and Southern Company Services.
In 2003, she was named president and CEO of Gulf Power, the first woman and youngest executive to lead a Southern Company operating company. The steps she took to restore power to her customers in the wake of Hurricane Ivan (barely more than a year after she took charge of Gulf Power) is still held up as a standard in crisis leadership. In 2011, she became president and CEO of Southern Company Services in Atlanta.
From 2013-20, Story served one year as CFO and six years as CEO and president of American Water, the nation’s largest publicly traded water and wastewater utility company. During her tenure, American Water became the only water utility to become part of the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Utility Average. While leading American Water, she was one of only 23 women serving as a CEO of an S&P 500 company, and she and her team more than tripled the stock price and market capitalization of the company in her six-year CEO tenure. But her most important accomplishment at American Water was reducing employee injuries 63% and decreasing serious injuries by 82%.
Story currently serves as chair of the Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility Committee, is a member of the Compensation and Talent Development Committee and the Finance and Risk Oversight Committee for Dominion Energy. She also serves on the board of the Newmont Corporation and Carrier Global.
She is a recipient of the Girl Scouts of America’s Woman of Distinction Award, the Distinguished Auburn Engineer Award and the Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award from Auburn University. One of her most prized honors was being named an honorary commander of the 33rd Fighter Wing, where she flew in an F-15 fighter jet. In 2010, Story was inducted into the State of Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame, and in 2018 she gave the keynote address at Auburn’s Spring graduation ceremony.
The Lifetime Achievement Award and Young Alumni Achievement Award recognize alumni for outstanding achievements in their professional lives, personal integrity and stature and service to the university.
Established in 2001, the awards are the highest given by the association. A committee of Auburn administrators, trustees, faculty and alumni select the recipients.
