The ECE Department was pleased to honor and present Professor Vikash Gilja with the Jacobs School Best Undergraduate Teacher Award, and Professors Paul Siegel and Ian Galton with the ECE Best Graduate Teacher Awards for 2015-16.  These outstanding instructors continually inspire students by skillfully sharing the knowledge and expertise they have gained through their own studies.

Professor Gilja played an instrumental role in creating two new undergraduate courses that lie at the heart of efforts to make the ECE undergraduate curriculum more "hands-on" and more project-oriented: ECE 5, Experience ECE: Making, Breaking, Hacking Stuff, which has just been made a required course for EE majors, and ECE 16, Rapid Hardware and Software Design.  Prof. Gilja also taught ECE 15, Engineering Computation, a large and notoriously difficult required course.  Student comments about Prof. Gilja's classes include "Love the projects!! Love the maker space, love having access to all the tools," and "ECE 15 is a great programming class and a great brain teaser. The homework is frustrating but in the good way."

On the graduate side, Prof. Siegel taught ECE 259A, Algebraic Coding, 259B, Probabilistic Coding, and 259C, Advanced Topics in Coding to our graduate students.  Student comments on his teaching include "Prof. Siegel is a brilliant teacher and is always willing to provide all sorts of support the students need in learning," and "Prof. Siegel... conveyed the concepts and ideas in an extremely elegant and insightful way and [ECE 259A] is by far the best course I have done to date."

Prof. Galton taught ECE 264A, B and C, CMOS Analog Integrated Circuits & Systems I, II and III.  His impact in the classroom can be summed up in the following comment from a graduate student about ECE 264A: "Professor Galton has extremely effective communication skills, is brilliant, methodical and cares about students understanding the course.  It's been a delightful academic experience."

Congratulations to our 2015-16 Best Teacher Awardees!