2004 Recipients Announced for Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award and Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award

Date: June 8, 2004
Contact: Marlys Amundson ( marlysa@support.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-206-0540

The high quality of teaching in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science is recognized not only by its peers, students and alumni, but also honored by its partners in industry.

Professor Ben Wu

Two such annual honors in the School are the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award and the Excellence in Teaching Award sponsored by Lockheed Martin. Both awards consider the nominees’ quality of classroom teaching, contributions to curriculum development, high personal and professional standards, and high scores on student teaching evaluations.

“We are grateful to our friends in industry who recognize the exceptionally talented and caring educators we have,” said Vijay Dhir, dean of engineering. “The high quality of the recipients year after year is a testament to the outstanding faculty in the School.”

The Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award honors junior faculty members who have demonstrated academic excellence in classroom teaching. The 2004 recipients, each of whom will receive $1,000 from the company, are Bioengineering Professor Benjamin Wu and Computer Science Professor Glenn Reinman.

Professor Glenn Reinman

Wu was honored for his key role in developing the new bioengineering undergraduate curriculum, which includes 20 new innovative courses; his work as the Biomedical Engineering Society’s faculty advisor; and his numerous contributions to the department. Wu, vice chair of the Bioengineering Department, conducts research on functional biomaterials for tissue engineering.

The committee selected Reinman for his well-organized and innovative class presentations and curricula, including a requirement for students to do design cycle trade-offs; taking time after class to provide students with advanced supplementary course materials; and developing a two-part series of graduate courses covering advanced topics in microprocessors architecture. Reinman, who joined the computer science faculty in 2001, has research interests in computer architecture, exploitation of instruction level parallelism, cache design and prefetching, and load speculation, among other areas.

The Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award is open to all faculty members, and the 2004 recipient, Computer Science Professor Joseph DiStefano, III, will receive $2,500 from Lockheed Martin.

Professor Joseph DiStefano III

DiStefano was selected in part for his role in developing two graduate programs: biomedical systems (now systems biology) and biocybernetics. The committee was even more impressed with his efforts to develop and sustain the cybernetics interdepartmental undergraduate degree. The cybernetics program was highly innovative at the time it was developed, and still is to this day, because of its interdisciplinary nature and incorporation of research into an undergraduate curriculum. The cybernetics program is widely recognized on campus for the excellent students it attracts and the rigorous education it provides them. Much of the program’s success can be traced to DiStefano’s passion, energy, and dedication.

In 2003, DiStefano received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the UCLA Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. He is the Director of the Biocybernetics Teaching and Experimental Laboratory. DiStefano’s areas of research include biomodeling, computer methodology-biomedical systems/biocybernetics, pharmacokinetic and dynamic systems modeling and optimization, and expert systems applications in the life sciences and medicine research.