Six faculty members honored for inspired teaching

The six recipients of this year’s Yale College prizes for exceptional undergraduate teaching, announced on May 3 by Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis, stand out for a wide variety of reasons to the students who nominated them.

One, for example, came to class on Halloween dressed up as a skeleton, and sang opera. Another made his students feel they could “take on the world.” Yet another created such a warm classroom environment that it became a learning community where lifetime friendships were forged.

The prizewinning teachers, all from Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, are Marci Shore, associate professor of history; Nilay Hazari, the John Randolph Hoffman Professor of Chemistry; Rourke O’Brien, associate professor of sociology; Evangelia Chalioti, senior lecturer and associate chair in the Department of Economics; Matsuku Ngame, senior lector in French; and John Carlson, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology.

What they all share in common, Lewis said during a ceremony at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, is a deep commitment to undergraduate education. All of them, Lewis said, put immense “effort, energy, and imagination” into their teaching and leave their students feeling both inspired and transformed.