Papailiopoulos receives prestigious IEEE teaching award

The IEEE Education Society recently awarded University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Dimitris Papailiopoulos its prestigious Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award.

The award is presented to a member of the IEEE Education Society who has made outstanding contributions to teaching unusually early in their professional career.

Papailiopoulos was cited for “his dedication to teaching excellence, his focus on student-centered learning success, and his championing of active learning strategies in both his own teaching and among his colleagues.”

In the spring of 2021, Papailiopoulos also received the Emil Steiger Teaching Award from UW-Madison. 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.

The IEEE Education Society will present the Mac Van Valkenburg Award at the Frontiers in Education conference taking place in Lincoln, Nebraska, in October 2021.