2023 Faculty Awards for Teaching Excellence
Faculty Awards for Teaching Excellence honor faculty members in Arts & Sciences who devote special efforts to teaching and inspiring their students through lectures, seminars, laboratories, independent studies, and mentoring. In 2023, three faculty members were honored.
Nominations for the award come initially from the Student Assembly's Undergraduate Council and the A&S Graduate Student Association. Candidates are evaluated on the basis of teaching quality, innovation, and demonstrated commitment to student learning. Awardees are chosen in order to balance academic rank, disciplinary area, graduate and undergraduate teaching, and tenure and non-tenure eligible status, including lecturers.
Drew LaMar
Drew has a unique position at William & Mary as a mathematician embedded within the Biology Department. His scholarship focuses primarily on the interplay between mathematics and biology, engaging students majoring in Biology, CAMS, Mathematics, Data Science, and Computer Science. He instills in our students an appreciation of mathematical tools with patience, enthusiasm, and eloquence.
Drew also spends an enormous amount of his time formalizing these experiences into publicly available curricula used by professors across the country and around the world. A&S faculty are lauded if they write one article for a college teaching journal, sharing their inventive classroom practices with others in a general way to magnify impact. Drew has taken this several levels higher, leveraging millions of dollars of federal grant money on creating, managing, and populating with content a premier storehouse of ready-to-use interdisciplinary teaching modules in the booming field of quantitative biology. Outside of the School of Education, it’s hard to think of a W&M faculty member who has contributed so much to national pedagogy, especially while maintaining a research lab of his own doing basic science research.
Student Testimony:
“Professor Drew LaMar from the Biology department cares deeply about his students and demonstrates this by always being willing to explain concepts and meeting with students to answer questions about his courses. His lecture material is very well organized and during lecture he always engages students. Furthermore, Professor LaMar cares about his students and our well-being!”
Kristin Wustholz
Written by Robert D. PikeProfessor and Department Chair of Chemistry
I am extraordinarily pleased to nominate Professor Kristin Wustholz for the Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence. Kristin is a gifted, compassionate, effective, and beloved instructor, who serves as a model of innovative and high-quality teaching at W&M.
Prof. Wustholz represents the very best of what we strive for here at W&M. Unsurprisingly, she has already been the recipient of many awards, both within W&M and beyond. It is difficult to envision a more deserving faculty candidate than Kristin. She is a shining example for all of whom seek to teach the whole student in a rigorous, engaging, and transformative fashion. She has my highest recommendation for this honor.
Student Testimonies:
“I thought Professor Wustholz was overall an amazing teacher! She was so knowledgeable about a very niche subject that it made learning the content very easy. Rarely have a I had a class that integrates real–world examples and application of the content and it made the experience so much more enjoyable.”
“Prof. Wustholz is an incredibly valuable member of the chemistry department and the greater W&M community. In addition to her innate teaching skill, she is a dedicated and caring professor. Her classroom is a welcoming space, which is especially valuable for a course as universally feared as physical chemistry.”
“She has described herself as a "why" chemist, never satisfied with hand-waving, always encouraging students to understand the theoretical underpinnings of her lessons."
“Prof. Wustholz has personally inspired me by allowing me to become involved in her research lab during undergrad, which is what made me decide to stay at W&M to pursue an MS in Chemistry. As a graduate advisor, she has continued to demonstrate the same encouragement and support that I witnessed from her in an undergraduate setting."
Iyabo Osiapem
Written by Chinua Thelwell, Ph.D.Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies
Over the past two years, professor Osiapem has offered excellent classes for the Africana Studies program and the Linguistics Program. Iyabo consistently creates an excellent classroom experience for her students. This is true even when she is offering asynchronous courses during summer sessions.
Furthermore, Iyabo is single-handedly offering the language classes that Africana Studies majors need to complete the major: African American English and Caribbean Language and Identity. These are essential parts of the Africana Studies curriculum, and the program is extremely grateful for her offerings.
Regarding her teaching in linguistics specifically, Iyabo’s courses go beyond the foundational level of looking at language-based discrimination, which means that she is teaching sensitive topics to a wide range of students. She handles this extremely well and our students and program benefit greatly from her work.
Student Testimonies:
“Professor Osiapem has had such an impact on my success throughout my freshman fall semester. She thoroughly enjoys her field, and her enthusiasm comes through in her lectures. As a Black student, having Professor O. this year made me feel like I belonged.”
"I could not be more thankful for the opportunity to have taken a course with Professor Osiapem. The material she covered in class was engaging, as were the various readings assigned throughout the course. Her feedback on assignments was thoughtful and she was always available to discuss aspects of the course which I appreciated."
“I think this is a course that should honestly be required for students! The course material was so interesting, and professor Osiapem was so engaging that it rarely ever felt like schoolwork. We were taught a variety of different academic necessities such as a research proposal and an annotated bibliography... I would seriously recommend the course to anyone, not just people interested in Africana studies and Linguistics.”
