7-1-2024
Please join us in congratulating Eric Gawiser for winning the School of Graduate Studies Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring Award for 2024.
Here is the link:
https://grad.rutgers.edu/news/2024-merit-and-achievement-awards-ceremony
From Jack Hughes, Physics & Astronomy Dept Chair: "It is my pleasure to talk about Prof. Eric Gawiser’s accomplishments that have won him the Faculty Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring Award. I have seen directly the tremendously positive impact that Eric has on the careers of our graduate students. In the classroom his graduate teaching has been impressive, with average student evaluations of 4.7, 4.8, and 5.0 for the three graduate courses he typically teaches. Eric revamped our graduate Cosmology curriculum to emphasize presentation and writing skills. He developed an innovative course on Data Science in Astrophysics that integrates research and teaching and promotes professional development by having students pursue two term projects, one as the advisor for a project they design and the other as the advisee for a peer's project. Eric adopts a patient mentoring style tailored to each Ph.D. advisee's personality, with amazing results: after his PhD in 2019 Kartheik Iyer moved on to the U. Toronto as a Dunlap Fellow and is now a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia; Humna Awan (2020) earned the SGS Harvey Waterman Medal of Excellence, and she moved to a Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Fellowship at U. Michigan; Adam Broussard (2022) chose a career in industry becoming a Research and Development Engineer at Raytheon; non-traditional student Charlotte Olsen (2023) won the department’s Schommer Prize for the best refereed Astrophysics publication for the year and is now a Catalyst Fellow at CUNY. These prize postdoctoral fellowships represent an amazing 75% of those earned by graduating Rutgers Astrophysics Ph.D.s in the past 15 years! Eric has four current Ph.D. advisees who are on equally impressive paths, with Nicole Firestone already earning an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Congratulations, Eric, on this richly deserved award!"