Debra Carney is the 2019 winner of the Mines Teaching Award for Teaching Faculty!
Deb contributes to all aspects of academic life at Mines, but especially to our teaching mission. First and foremost, she is a dedicated teacher, who is highly appreciated by her students. Even more importantly, Deb constantly strives to improve upon what and how she teaches. She incorporates the latest insights of mathematics education researchers, and has contributed to the community herself both by presenting at regional and national conferences and by publishing a peer-reviewed journal article on her innovations for Linear Algebra.
Deb’s approach to teaching is rooted in active learning and employs partially flipped classrooms coupled with the use of technology. Deb has produced videos to supplement her instruction, both internal for Mines, and also external for the 2019 edition of a Calculus textbook published by Pearson. The videos, activities, worksheets, quizzes and exercises created for the partially flipped classroom versions of Linear Algebra and Calculus II are now adopted by most other instructors of those courses at Mines. In addition to her contribution to a widely-used Calculus textbook, Deb has on multiple occasions shared her experience with others at Mines and beyond. The highlight thus far is probably her invitation to speak on “Making Calculus Videos and Incorporating them into Your Calculus Courses” at the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics this coming March.
Deb is a proven and respected leader of the AMS teaching operations. Not only has she been Assistant Department Head since 2013, but she also repeatedly serves as course coordinator for multi-section Calculus or Linear Algebra courses. Moreover, Deb has been a mentor for our Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows, has played an essential role in developing a Teaching Seminar for AMS graduate students and is an advisor to the successful Society for Women in Mathematics (SWiM) club. Deb’s service contributions within AMS, at Mines, and in the greater mathematics community are also significant, for example she was recently elected as a member of the Executive Committee for the Rocky Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America.
Congratulations to Deb on this deserved recognition!
Bill Navidi is the 2019 winner of the Mines Teaching Award for Tenured and Tenure-track Professors
Bill Navidi is statistics at Mines! Without him, the AMS Department probably would not feature the letter “S” in its acronym. Bill was the driving force in building the statistics program in the first place. He led the design of the curricula (for BS, MS, and PhD degrees), developed many of the courses, and has taught almost all of them. Bill’s student course evaluations are excellent—students like the fact that he is enthusiastic, very direct and to the point in his instruction. Students also find his classes very engaging and humorous.
Bill’s research interests have always been highly interdisciplinary with a focus mostly on applications in biology, medicine and health as well as environmental issues. All of these topics are attractive to students and have led to numerous undergraduate and graduate research projects. However, Bill’s stature in the statistics community rests to a large extent on him being the (co-)author of four different, very successful textbooks on introductory statistics. His books have gone through several editions and have been adopted by numerous leading universities across the country. In his textbooks, as in the classroom, Bill makes use of real world data sets, some of which are inspired by his research. This helps motivate students and shows them direct connections to their future jobs.
The AMS statistics programs are successful because of Bill’s dedication to the curriculum and his guidance for our students.
We congratulate Bill on this deserved recognition!