The transformative education offered at the University of Chicago begins in the classroom, with the teachers who inspire, engage and inform their students.
UChicago annually recognizes faculty for their incredible teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students through the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, believed to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching; and the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring, which honor faculty for their work with graduate students.
Learn more about this year’s recipients below:
- Quantrell Awards: David Cash, Eleonory Gilburd, Lenore Grenoble, Cathy Pfister
- Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring Awards: John Birge, Bryan Dickinson, Timothy Harrison, Kay Macleod and Alex Shaw
Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards
David Cash, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College
David Cash remembers the moment that changed his understanding of math completely. It was in an undergraduate course in discrete mathematics, he said, where he realized the field was more than a row of rote problems to solve over and over.
“Instead, these were problems where I would read two sentences and then walk around and think about it for the rest of the afternoon,” he said. “I learned how to sit with a problem and genuinely enjoy being stuck. I find it so joyful, and the peace and simplicity that comes with it compared to everything else in life.”
He loved it so much that this is now what he does for a living, as a mathematically oriented computer scientist—and now that he teaches his own discrete mathematics class, he tries to pass that fascination on to the students.
According to his students, it works. One wrote: “His genuine passion for the material was so contagious that now I intend on specializing in theoretical computer science.”