Engineers also make excellent teachers
Associate Professor Bryony James from the Faculty of Engineering has been awarded a teaching excellence award from the University and nominated for a national teaching award.
Bryony, who received a Sustained Excellence in Teaching award, says she was pleased to get the teaching excellence award for a job she loves.
“I always wanted to be an engineer and being a lecturer in engineering is the best of all worlds as I get to be a materials engineer, run the Research Centre for Surface and Materials Science, do research on food structure (including chocolate, cheese, wine and biscuits!) and I get to pass on the passion I have for all of this to 700 hundred of the brightest kids in the country each year. What's not to love about my job?”
She is also fortunate to have incredible colleagues to teach with and learn from, says Bryony.
“Teaching is a team sport, even when you're standing in front of a class on your own. The best teaching experience the students can have is when all the lecturers in a course are relating their material to that of the other lecturers in that course, relating the material to their research and their colleagues' research, and relating the material to what the students see around them every day.”
The University awarded eight teaching excellence awards and Bryony is one of three winners nominated by the University for the 2013 Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards (TTEA).
Bryony, from the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, teaches stage one Materials Science and a postgraduate paper in Advanced Materials Characterisation.
Her research areas include materials characterisation, food structure and property relationships, and surface science and engineering.
Bryony has a PhD in Materials Engineering from The University of Auckland and a BE (Hons) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Bath, England.
