BME faculty wins Outstanding First-Year Seminar Instructor Award
block
Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Tolou Shokuhfar received the UIC Outstanding First-Year Seminar Instructor Award.
This award recognizes UIC first-year seminar course instructors who have demonstrated exemplary teaching and made a positive impact on students, inspiring learning, development, and success.
The first-year seminar course aims to introduce first-year students to their discipline and give them an understanding and vision of what they will learn in that field.
“When students intern in the biomedical engineering field, it might not provide comprehensive knowledge about what biomedical engineering really is but is a limited view of certain aspects of biomedical engineering,” Shokuhfar said.
Through this course, she added, they learn about all aspects of science, research, and industry.
“This course is very interactive, and it’s not only engaging freshmen students, but since we have graduate student speakers, it engages them as well,” she said.
“When I see they’re speaking really fast or being too technical as if they are defending their thesis, I try to keep the talk more interactive and simpler because that’s also a very important and maybe even more difficult and more challenging skill,” Shokuhfar said. “It takes expertise to explain very technical research to groups of students who have no clue what your research is about, so keeping a talk interactive means they will also learn from those questions or their interactions with the speaker. It might be more challenging to explain it in simple ways, but I tell the graduate students that if you are able to do it, it means that you have more knowledge about what you do.”
She noted that often the most successful speakers are those who have little information on their slides and explain their research in the simplest ways, which makes their talk the most engaging.
During the class, Shokuhfar also tells her own story of why she became a professor, her educational background, and personal journey.
Shokuhfar is the first biomedical engineering faculty to receive the award and the second College of Engineering faculty, along with Simona Narubin.
The Office of Student Success and Belonging sponsors the awards.