Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching: Howard Nusbaum
Howard Nusbaum asks in his research: How do we learn to understand the sounds we use to communicate from speech to music? Nusbaum investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate spoken language use, as well as language learning and the role of attention in speech perception. In addition, he has begun to investigate how we understand the meaning of music. Our knowledge of sound and language is deep and extensive, and he also studies how sleep consolidates learning to make it stable and resistant to forgetting. He also studies how cognitive and social-emotional processes interact in decision-making, which has led to a new project studying wisdom.
“Teaching our undergraduates is always an intellectual challenge and is as much a part of my intellectual development as I hope learning is for the students. I learn a lot from the insights and the questions our students present, both in class and working in the laboratory, which is itself a teaching experience.
The undergraduates who work in the lab come up with questions that are at the leading edge of science. And because they don’t have as many preconceived notions, they can often see into problems in a way that is quite different from an expert scientist.”
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Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching: Jason Merchant
Jason Merchant, professor and chair of linguistics, works mainly in the theory of syntax, and on its interface with semantics. More particularly, most of his research concentrates on the cross-linguistic grammatical constraints on ellipsis, cases where the form seems to underdetermine the perceived (and intended) meaning. He is interested in data from a wide variety of languages, but has published mostly on Germanic, Greek, Slavic, and Romance languages. Recently, he has taught everything from the Core course Language and the Human and Intro to Linguistics to graduate seminars on agreement phenomena and comparatives.
“I also feel it’s important to mention that some of my most valuable experiences with undergraduates—and I hope they feel this way as well—have come outside of the classroom, in particular in advising BA honors theses.”
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Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching: Megan McNulty
Megan McNulty leads non-biology majors through the Core Biology sequence. Whether in the neuroscience-“flavored” track of the general Core Bio course or one of the two Core Bio topics courses (From Brain to Behavior and The Human Body in Health and Disease), the Neurobiology, Pharmacology, and Physiology PhD alumnus draws upon her education and laboratory experience to expose her students to the process of science, not just the results.
“One of the reasons I love teaching non-majors is that they are coming from many different disciplines and they raise questions that prompt us to think about the biology in really different ways. It’s probably the most challenging aspect of the job, but it’s also the most exciting too. What students bring to the table are ideas and insights that I, as a trained biologist, may not have considered.”
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Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching: Gregory Engel
Gregory Engel focuses his research on leveraging precise theoretical predictions to predict, identify, and characterize conical intersection structures, with the ultimate goal of rationally controlling photoreactivity. His research group intends first to employ laser spectroscopy to watch the reactions, then to invoke theoretical modeling to understand the data and to locate new substrates.
“This is simple. The University of Chicago is an absolutely fantastic place to do research, and the reason is the students. It’s not my hands on the knobs in the lab; it’s my students’. I get wonderful graduate students, wonderful postdocs, and wonderful undergrads.”
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PS: We promise Prof. Engel is not a ghost.
