Where are you from and what brought you to Georgia Tech?

The Georgia Institute of Technology Offices of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) are pleased to announce that three professors of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering received 2015 GT-FIRE Awards (Transformative Research and Education Annual Awards):

Correction to this story is run to include ME grad student, Alexis Noel.

This year, eight Woodruff School students earned graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF), including three undergraduates: Shantonio Birch, Samuel Cruz, and Max Stockslager; and five graduate students: Hagan Bush, Alexander Limia, Alexis Noel, Eric Tervo, and Luke Yates.

A column in The New York Times this past February, titled “How to Hold Colleges Accountable,” had several suggestions for making higher education more effective, but at the top of the list was “quality of teaching.” Noting that most professors come from Ph.D. programs where there’s much more emphasis on research than pedagogy, the co-authors lamented the lack of training, evaluation, and assessment that college professors receive when it comes to teaching.  

Well, Georgia Tech is on it — and actually has been for some time.