Two BU Faculty Honored with Outstanding Teaching Awards
Professors Bobak Nazer and Fallou Ngom have each been honored with outstanding teaching awards.
Bobak Nazer, a College of Engineering associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate department chair for undergraduate programs, is being honored with the 2024 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. The award recognizes the faculty member or team that best exemplifies innovation in teaching by use, development, or adaptation of technology. It celebrates innovation that results in positive learning outcomes for undergraduate students and that is recognized or adopted by faculty colleagues within or outside BU. The award comes with a $10,000 stipend. Nazer was mainly recognized for transforming a course into 50 short videos containing animations with narrated explanations, which the student would watch before a lecture. This enabled lectures to guide further discussion and leave time for activities and games.
Fallou Ngom, a College of Arts & Sciences anthropology professor, won the Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award—an honor that recognizes scholars who excel as teachers inside and outside the classroom and who contribute to the art and science of teaching and learning. Ngom’s research has helped to uncover an ancient writing system used by communities in West Africa. One of Ngom’s achievements was altering his sociolinguistics class, which relied heavily upon European languages (Dutch, French, Portuguese), to address a class who studied and spoke various African languages. This enabled the students to apply the complex sociolinguistic theories to languages that were familiar to them.
