Khiara M. Bridges and Rosina Georgiadis of CAS to Be Honored
Gitner Family Award goes to Georgiadis, Provost’s Scholar-Teacher Award to Khiara M. Bridges.
It’s an “age-old problem” in science instruction, Rosina Georgiadis says: the number of students often outstrips the availability of lab equipment for a given week’s topic. Georgiadis, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of chemistry, licked that problem—and in the process, might have upended the way science is taught.
Professors typically address this supply-and-demand conundrum with a round-robin tactic, giving some students a week on the equipment related to that week’s topic, while their peers busy themselves on other instruments, rotating use the next week. Not having to share instruments gives students more time in any given week on that week’s relevant tool. But “it also means that for most students, the lab activities are out of sync with the lectures,” as an article in the chemistry journal C&EN explains.
In 2016, Georgiadis came up with the idea of supplementing lectures and labs with virtual instruments, enabling all students to use the relevant instruments at the same time. Two years later, the virtual equipment allowed her students to collaborate with international scientists who were testing the quality of medicines in countries wrestling with substandard or counterfeit pharmaceuticals.
For her innovation, Georgiadis will receive this year’s Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. The award, which comes with a $10,000 stipend, is given annually to a faculty member who “best exemplifies innovation in teaching by use, development, or adaptation of technology.”
At the same event, Khiara Bridges, a School of Law professor of law and a CAS professor of anthropology, will receive the 2019 Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award, which recognizes “outstanding scholars who excel as teachers inside and outside the classroom and who contribute to the art and science of teaching and learning.” That honor confers a $5,000 stipend.
The constitutional law scholar researches how race and privilege affect due process and equal protection rights for people of color, especially in healthcare.
