Fawaz wins distinguished teaching award

Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Kassem Fawaz is the recipient of the 2022 Emil H. Stieger Teaching Award, one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Distinguished Teaching Awards.

The Stieger Award was created in 1958 to honor the late Emil H. Stieger, a former president of the Deltox Grass Rug Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and passionate supporter of Wisconsin’s state universities. The prize is traditionally given to junior faculty members.

In his research, Fawaz works on online privacy, designing and developing intuitive user interfaces to help people navigate privacy options and designing practical systems for enhancing the privacy of users.

Undergraduate and graduate students cite Fawaz for his student-centric teaching and his ability to present complex topics in a way non-experts can understand. Recently, Fawaz overhauled ECE 454: Mobile Computing Laboratory, one of three capstone courses for computer engineering seniors, updating its content and making its projects relevant to current trends in the mobile computing industry.

This is not the first recognition of Fawaz’s teaching; last year, he received the Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching from the UW-Madison College of Engineering.