Three members of the Jacobs School community were selected to receive Distinguished Teaching Awards from the UC San Diego Academic Senate. The prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award is bestowed upon up to five members of the Academic Senate, three non-Senate faculty members, and three graduate students at UC San Diego each year, to recognize and honor the important role excellent teaching plays at the University. The Committee on Distinguished Teaching seeks to select those who exhibit creativity, innovative teaching methods, the ability to motivate students to actively seek out knowledge, and an extraordinary level of teaching commitment.
James Friend, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Joe Gibbs Politz, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received Distinguished Teaching Awards for Senate Members. Katya Evdokimenko, a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received a Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award, Non-Senate Members.
Learn more about all three Jacobs School of Engineering recipients below.
Q: What do you teach?
A: I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including dynamics, acoustofluidics, computer aided analysis and design, and cardiovascular fluid mechanics, to name a few.
Q: What do you enjoy about teaching?
A: I think I most enjoy seeing students eager to learn develop in the time I have with them to learn the topics we cover and become better at them than I ever was. I also enjoy learning myself, and teaching new courses gives me the opportunity to really learn the material well enough to be able to teach it.
Q: Why is teaching an important, integral part of your job?
A: I love teaching! While research is satisfying, and I enjoy the experience of personal and professional growth that it gives me, I really enjoy the consistent reward of seeing students advance week to week, asking questions, seeing the light turn on and them applying what they’ve learned to new things, to things I’ve not considered. And to witness them talking to each other about the material with excitement and new ideas. It’s most gratifying.
Q: What do you teach?
A: An explicit goal of mine has been to teach courses across our whole curriculum to get a thorough firsthand picture of what students experience in our program. I've taught a wide variety of courses in our lower division, ranging from majority non-major courses for folks just getting into CS, to discrete math, to core programming and data structures courses. I also teach our senior-level and graduate compilers courses, which are about creating and improving programming languages, an area that I find has a wonderful synthesis of theory and engineering.
Q: What do you enjoy about teaching?
A: Lots of things! One of the most impactful is hearing from students that something they learned in my classes showed up in their work or helped them accomplish something in another context. We put a lot of effort into making our courses and projects teach fundamental concepts through practical applications. Seeing that pay off is always gratifying.
Q: Why is teaching an important, integral part of your job?
A: Our students are so inspiring! The come from all kinds of backgrounds, work hard, and take advantage of the opportunities in our classes. Teaching is important to me because it's the most direct way I can use what I know to support them.
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| Evdokimenko with her students |
Q: What do you teach?
A: I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on topics ranging from the Elements of Materials Science, to Biomaterials and Medical Devices and Mechanical Behavior of Materials. I also teach several enrichment classes for the IDEA Engineering Student Center, including Fundamentals of Engineering Applications and Introduction to Engineering Research.
Q: What do you enjoy about teaching?
A: The students’ motivation, their genuine interest and their wonderful questions! Those questions are the key part of the whole entire teaching process, since they promote conversation and help to understand the subject on the next level of complexity.
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| When not teaching, Evdokimenko can be found scaling rock walls! |
Q: You've developed a post-lecture question component to your classes, can you talk about that?
A: I incorporated a daily “extra-credit part” into most of my classes. This part consists of questions/problems/free responses at the end of every lecture on the topic covered at the previous lecture. I grade this part myself and study the answers before the next lecture to see what students understood and didn't understand, and modify my next lecture accordingly. Also, I am providing my personal feedback to every student for this extra-credit part, which helps them a lot to comprehend the material covered in the class more deeply. This process also gives me the idea on what parts should be discussed in more detail.
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