I’m Tamara Chaplin. I’m associate professor of history and former Chair of the History Department’s teaching awards committee. It gives me tremendous pleasure to congratulate my colleague, Dr. Rana Hogarth, Helen Corley Petit Scholar and historian of slavery, race, and medicine in the Atlantic world for her teaching excellence, which was recognized with an LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2020. Dr. Hogarth uses the history classroom to transform her students lives. Often drawing on her own path-breaking research into how medical science informed the construction of racial ideologies in the modern West. Given the current political climate, Dr. Hogarth’s pedagogical contributions are both timely and critical. In courses on such topics as US history, African-American history, slavery and society, race, science and medicine, and the formation of US public health, Dr. Hogarth challenges our students to think deeply about how science, economics, politics, and culture interact with racial prejudice in ways that shape our world. She is a powerful advocate for diversity, passionately committed to rendering university education accessible to all. And in this way, she promotes the great mission of the public research university. Inclusivity, integration, opportunity, and the support of a greater social good through education and scholarship. Students regularly use the word “empowering” to describe her classes. And one of them told me, “Everyone should take her class. Not only would they learn a lot, but we would all get along so much better if everyone studied the kinds of things that she teaches.” This is really high praise. We are grateful for her contributions to our students and to our department, to our campus, and to our community. And I am so glad that she is receiving the recognition that she so richly deserves. Congratulations, Rana. And thank you for your work.

During his 27 years at Illinois, David has developed and taught numerous undergraduate courses in molecular and cell biology. He is the only faculty member in the history of our department that has taught undergraduate classes at all levels from 100 to 400 each time with glowing student evaluations. Students deeply appreciate David’s ability to make complex modern biology ideas andconcepts comprehensible. And faculty peers consider David the very best teacher among us. In fact, it is our departments long standing advice to all junior faculty that they observe David’s lectures to learn. David is always striving for innovation and further improvement in teaching. Whether it is pioneering the third-generation lecture video capture or developing online courses. Those that worked with David to develop and improve teaching technologies, all consider him to be among the finest instructors on campus. David is not just a talented teacher, he is an educator and mentor who cares deeply about his students and their learning. For the nomination of this award, we received a large number of support letters from his former students who consider David one of the most influential professors during their years at Illinois. David’s impact on these young lives are long-lasting. One of his former, former students wrote, and I quote, “I strongly believe I’m the best emergency medicine physician I can be because of the foundations built from Dr. Rivier’s classes.” We are truly honored to have David in our department, our school, and our university. Brian is an outstandingand inspiring teacher who puts enormous effort in course design, materials, teaching research, responding to student writing and mentoring. We are very fortunate to have him at Illinois. Congratulations Brian.

Hi, I’m Antonios Augoustakis, professor and head in the Department of Classics. It is my greatest pleasure to say a few words about Professor Brian Walters for receiving the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching award. Students recognize Brian as an exceptional teacher who inspires confidence in them, helping them grow as students, scholars, and citizens of the world. It is no surprise that Brian has been recognized on every single list of teachers ranked as excellent in the past six years as an assistant professor. Brian has an irresistible talent for making the ancient world fascinating to students from engaging them on assignments such as discussion boards, responses to alleged Twitter posts, such as the Emperor Nero’s handle @therealNero, or reacting to the past activities where students assume roles of people they have been studying in class based on the readings and the analysis of the texts, they have been closely scrutinizing. In Brian’s classes, students actively master information, analyze it, thinking critically about sources and debating positions with other students. Everyone talks, everyone participates. Brian’s colleagues also comment on the exceptional training students receive in his classes. They have been trained to be methodical and careful interpreters. His organizational skills are equally praiseworthy. He is systematic and meticulous. His lecture slides show good graphic expression skills, are clear and professional, accommodating all student audiences and needs. Brian is an outstanding and inspiring teacher who puts enormous effort in course design, materials, teaching research, responding to student writing and mentoring. We are very fortunate to have him at Illinois. Congratulations Brian.

Our entire department was so pleased that Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider received the 2020 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for his enthusiastic instruction and creative course innovations, particularly of courses that enroll large numbers (400-1,000) of students.

Since joining the CS faculty in 2013, Wade has taught a range of courses including introductory-level courses (CS 105,CS 107), data structures (CS 225), system programming (CS 241), data visualization (CS 205/305), and he created a series of three online MOOCs, providing foundational background knowledge for prospective graduate students looking to join the Masters of Computer Science program.

In every class he teaches, Wade builds mechanisms by which students can go beyond scripted assignments to apply their new skills in innovative ways. For example, in one of many creative assignments in CS 225, students learn new data structures through creating a program that turns the photos on their phone, iCloud, or Google Photos into an image mosaic made entirely with images they have taken.

Wade has contributed to the overall educational community by sharing the tools he developed for his courses, including anovel queuing system that facilitates students getting help from lab assistants in a very large course. This tool has been deployed in dozens of courses across five departments and in three advising offices campus wide, and it has been shown to improve student satisfaction and performance in programming assignments and on exams.

Outside of the classroom, Wade publishes data visualizations that provide interactive exploration of data, including work on the grade distributions at Illinois and tracking the spread of COVID-19. His work has been featured in Popular Mechanics, The Verge, Gizmodo, has been used by multiple governors in press briefings, and has been viewed by millions of readers.

Overall, he has mentored several hundred undergraduate students and many James Scholars, and he has served as a Pursuing Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE) faculty mentor for the last three years.

Wade routinely appears on the campus List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students, he has won the Grainger Engineering Collins Award for Innovative Teaching and the department’s Scott H. Fisher Computer ScienceTeaching Award, and he was an invited participant at the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education conference.

We are delighted that the campus recognized Wade’s excellence in undergraduate teaching with its prestigious award.

I’m Tom Johnson and I’m Head of the Department of Geology. I’m very happy to congratulate Professor Michael Stewart for receiving the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Michael is very dedicated to undergraduate teaching and he develops a close rapport with his students. His office is often occupied by two or three, maybe four or five students, intensely working on problem sets or having thoughtful geologic discussions. In his work with students, he strikes a balance where he is both the respected professor who commands respect, but also a very approachable mentor who takes great pride in developing the students talents and careers. Much of his work involves exemplary teaching in the field using active learning frameworks. Professor Stewart helps students make and record first-hand observations, form hypotheses, test those hypotheses, piece together narratives of geologic history and defend those narratives. He’s also highly organized and professional. This is particularly important in his role as our lead instructor of field-based courses and field trips. We are impressed by how well he juggles the logistic and safety aspects of leading large groups of students into the field. Professor Stewart has been the central faculty member in our undergraduate program for years. Many students, manygeology majors, have more contact with Professor Stewartthan with any other person in the department while they are here on the U of I campus. Moreover, our field courses are bonding experiences and his role as the departments lead field instructor gives him special status in that regard. So overall, the Department of Geology and its students benefit hugely from Professor Stewart’s exemplary skills and great dedication. I’m very pleased that we could recognize his extraordinary efforts and talents with the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

I have known Ana Olguin for nearly 10 years now. She was one of my students when I was at the University of Florida. Shortly after I joined the faculty here, I suggested to Ana that she might be a good fit for the doctoral program in curriculum and instruction. She joined me at the University of Illinois the next year. From my time at the University of Florida, I knew Ana to be a highly knowledgeable and highly skilled early childhood and early childhood special education teacher. I thought that her skills might translate well into teaching pre-service teachers and how right I was. Ana excels at her work with our undergraduate students. They take her feedback very seriously and glow under her praise. Ana has been both a course instructor and placement supervisor in the early childhood teacher education program. Ana was involved in the revision of the program when she first arrived on campus, helping me to make sure that all of the pieces fit together. She helped to revise ‘Families, Communities, and Schools’, a course that she then taught to great success for five years. She also helped with the development of a new course, ‘Mathematics and Early Childhood’, a course that she has now taught for three years. Ana has been a leader among the field supervisors in early childhood. She has worked closely with me and with the Office of School and Community Experiences to continuously improve the placement experience for our students. Ana is leaving us an August. She will soon be defending her dissertation, a very important study of an asylum seeking families and encounters with Head Start and other programs intended to support vulnerable children and families. She will then be taking a faculty position at the Yew Chung College of Early Childhood in Hong Kong. A colleague of mine there has told me, now on multiple occasions, just how fortunate they are to have hired such as skilled instructor and promising scholar. Because of her deep understanding of early childhood pedagogy, Ana has also been made the director of the Pamela Peck Discovery Space, an innovative learning and play space for children across Hong Kong. We’re all very proud of Ana’s accomplishments here at the University of Illinois and look forward to seeing how she takes on this next chapter.

The CS department is so pleased that Darko Marinov was recognized with a 2020 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research honor. He has a long history of encouraging and supporting undergraduate research, and his students have gone on to be very successful.

An expert in software engineering, Darko studies and improves how teams of people build software with an emphasis on improving software quality through testing. These topics are increasingly important as software controls more and more of our daily lives.

At the time he won this award, Darko had welcomed more than 35 undergraduate students into his research group. To date, nearly 20 of these students have gone on to pursue graduate degrees at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Illinois, Princeton, Cornell Tech, Northwestern, National University of Singapore, and EPFL in Switzerland. Several of these students have themselves become faculty members at places like University of Texas at Austin, Illinois, Harvard, Columbia, and Imperial College London.

As an example of the caliber of work that Darko encourages and supports, one of these students helped develop novel tools that can detect or fix so-called flaky tests, which are a major concern for companies such as Facebook.

Three years ago, Darko co-initiated a summer research program for undergraduates in CS, which attracted more than 50 students. He has made multiple appearances on the campus List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Students, and he also received the Engineering Council Excellence in Advising Award.

All in all, Darko sets a great example for his fellow faculty members and is truly a valuable asset to our department.

Hi, my name is Shelley Schmidt. And I have the privilege of sharing some remarks about Dr. Dawn Bohn, recipient of the 2020 Campus Excellence in Online and Distance Teaching award. First of all, Dawn is an outstanding director of our off-campus master’s program in food science. With thoughtful planning and engagement of food science faculty, Dawn grew the program from ten to over 90 degree seeking students plus numerous non-degree seeking students. Secondly, Dawn is a seminal instructor in the program. She not only teaches a number of courses in the program, but she does so in a manner that has students praising her teaching skills. As one of her students commented, “Dr. Bohn is an engaging, thoughtful, enthusiastic instructor who clearly loves not only the subject matter, but also bringing it to life for her students.” And thirdly, Dawn is clearly the face of the program. When people think of the off-campus master’s program in food science at Illinois, they think of Dr. Dawn Bohn. Dawn is the first of contact for the program, the one that makes all the pieces in the middle work, and the one that stays connected with the alumni of the program and their companies. In the words of one of the off-campus students, “Dr. Dawn Bohn was a key element to my successful progress throughout the online master’s program. Overall, Dr. Bohn is a remarkable person that truly cares about each student in the program. I couldn’t imagine a better experience and a better person to help me successfully reach my goal of graduating with a master’s degree in food science from the University of Illinois.” Congratulations to my dear friend and amazing colleague. And thank you for all you do. And moreover, for who you are.

Hello. My name is John Caughlin from the Department of Communication. We were very pleased to learn that Neil Baer won the campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising in 2020. As one of our recent alums said, “This award was made for Neil.” Why is it the case? To start, Neil does a fantastic job of informing students of what they need to know and he goes beyond that by serving as a true mentor. Students trust him to help them through their important life and career decisions. As one student wrote, “Neil has not only provided me with helpful academic advice throughout my past year and a half at the University of Illinois but he’s also supported me in making the best decisions regarding my future. He has made my college experience so much more comfortable. And he made me feel so much more confident in my future goals.” At the same time that Neil is encouraging students to feel more confident, he’s also challenging them. One 2019 alum said that “Neil had this way of making me feel totally at ease while also encouraging me to pursue difficult ventures. For a person as anxious as I am that was a blessing. He would gently nudge me in different directions of options that weren’t easy but were very rewarding.” I could go on about all the other things that Neil does for our department, from enhancing our understanding of undergraduate enrollment patterns, to greatly improving the way that we communicate with our majors. But the core of his excellence is in the sustained relationships he builds with students. Students can tell that he really cares about their growth and success. So they trust him to help them navigate their time at the university and beyond. I know it’s not literally true that this award was made for Neil, but that student who said that was nevertheless speaking truth. Congratulations Neil.

The CS department is so pleased that Darko Marinov was recognized with a 2020 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research honor. He has a long history of encouraging and supporting undergraduate research, and his students have gone on to be very successful.

An expert in software engineering, Darko studies and improves how teams of people build software with an emphasis on improving software quality through testing. These topics are increasingly important as software controls more and more of our daily lives.

At the time he won this award, Darko had welcomed more than 35 undergraduate students into his research group. To date, nearly 20 of these students have gone on to pursue graduate degrees at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Illinois, Princeton, Cornell Tech, Northwestern, National University of Singapore, and EPFL in Switzerland. Several of these students have themselves become faculty members at places like University of Texas at Austin, Illinois, Harvard, Columbia, and Imperial College London.

As an example of the caliber of work that Darko encourages and supports, one of these students helped develop novel tools that can detect or fix so-called flaky tests, which are a major concern for companies such as Facebook.

Three years ago, Darko co-initiated a summer research program for undergraduates in CS, which attracted more than 50 students. He has made multiple appearances on the campus List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Students, and he also received the Engineering Council Excellence in Advising Award.

All in all, Darko sets a great example for his fellow faculty members and is truly a valuable asset to our department.