Bud Duvall. Brilliant, impressive, important scholar. He made a mid-career change from being a cutting-edge quantifier/modeler to (for lack of a better term) a post-positivist orientation. He has long, long, long struggled to make an important space for critical, non-positivist, qualitative work against considerable odds at Minnesota, where he created and sustained the "Minnesota School" of scholars – an invisible college of his students that includes Tarak Barkawi (Cambridge, UK), Michael Barnett (Minnesota), Roxanne Doty (Arizona State), Mark Laffey (LSE), Himadeep Muppidi, Jutta Weldes (Bristol, UK), and Alex Wendt (OSU).

We are honored that Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph have accepted the Grain of Sand award for 2010, the first one to be given. In the view of members of the award committee, they embody the attributes described above both personally and in terms of their work.