Papailiopoulos receives 2021 UW–Madison Distinguished Teaching Award

Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Dimitris Papailiopoulos is among the 13 University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty members chosen to receive 2021 Distinguished Teaching Awards, an honor given out since 1953 to recognize the university’s finest educators.

Papailiopoulos received the Emil Steiger Teaching Award. Papailiopoulos is a world-class researcher who brings his passion for discovery into the classroom. He has made outstanding contributions to undergraduate and graduate education in the College of Engineering at an early stage in his career, even while establishing an internationally recognized research program in the extremely competitive area of machine learning.

Papailiopoulos created and teaches a new, upper-level graduate course on large-scale machine learning and optimization. It meets an important campus need for advanced training in the rapidly growing data sciences field. As a student-centered teacher, he feels called to be a supportive learning coach who guides all students to learning success and regularly reaches out to students who have not performed well on assessments to see if he can help them improve their learning.