Among all the honors being handed out at this time of year, the best teaching awards are important indicators of how students perceive faculty members. This year, the UCSD chapter of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi (TBP) couldn't decide on a single professor for the honor, so TBP decided to honor three Jacobs School of Engineering "Faculty of the Year" -- and two of the three are from the same department: CSE. What's more, both come from the same research group.
The incoming president of TBP, third-year Bioengineering major Anthony Nguyen, presented award certificates to CSE professors Geoffrey Voelker (on left) and Joseph Pasquale. Both are faculty in CSE's Systems and Networking group. Both Pasquale and Voelker rank highly as teachers, and students also like their sense of fun and adventure with courses such as CSE 125 (Voelker's "videogame" capstone course) and Pasquale's course CSE 4GS/6GS, in which he explores the "Mathematical Beauty in Rome" (and Florence). The next 5-week study-abroad program takes place this summer and it's designed for "students in engineering, math and science to experience the beauty of mathematics through architecture in Rome." The Rome experience begins in late June. TBP members were asked to recognize faculty who "positively influenced and developed the lives of young engineers." In addition to Voelker and Pasquale, TBP also honored professor Gabriel Silva from the Bioengineering department. The awards were presented at the honor society's end-of-year banquet on May 29. [Photos by Tau Beta Pi Technology Chair and former CSE representative Jesse Qin, a third-year computer science major.]