SPINLAB @ MSU

MSU Today: Faculty and staff honored, celebrated at MSU Awards Convocation

FRIB’s Jaideep Singh receives Donald F. Koch Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award

This award recognizes teachers who take pride in and are committed to quality undergraduate teaching and who demonstrate substantial continuing involvement in undergraduate education. All current fixed term, academic specialists with a primary teaching assignment, and tenure system faculty with at least three years of teaching experience at Michigan State University are eligible for nomination.

One Donald F. Koch Award is given annually.

The Donald F. Koch Award for Quality in Undergraduate Teaching is supported by the MSU Alumni Club of Mid-Michigan and by Donald F. Koch and Barbara J. Sawyer-Koch.

Citation:

As a researcher, Dr. Jaideep Taggart Singh applies atomic, molecular, and optical physics techniques to answer fundamental questions in nuclear and particle physics; he is also passionate about creating, manipulating, and detecting spin-polarized nuclei. Additionally, from the outset of his career, Dr. Singh has demonstrated a commitment to teaching, requesting to be sent to the American Physical Society’s New Faculty Workshop (NFW) almost immediately upon beginning his career at Michigan State. NFW leverages both evidence-based teaching approaches and well-established educational technologies to support new faculty members in instruction.

Dr. Singh’s attendance at this course was instrumental in developing his mode of classroom instruction, where he applies evidence-based teaching practices. This has been particularly evident in his teaching for the introductory course on electricity and magnetism, which covers electrostatics, dielectrics, magnetic fields of steady state currents, and Faraday’s law of induction. Toward this end, he implemented a lecture format featuring about 10 clicker questions per class to help keep students engaged, especially during COVID-19 and required online learning; he also implemented two homework help sessions every week in the evenings, one on zoom and one in-person to ensure student comprehension, especially during online learning.

Dr. Singh’s attendance at the NFW course was, however, but the beginning of his pursuit of teaching excellence. He attended a three-day workshop on writing across disciplines that he used to revise the Advanced Laboratory class course for physicists (AdvLab), where he redesigned the course’s writing component so it was the central thread connecting all course activities, increasing overall class comprehension. As one of his colleagues noted, “His [Dr. Singh’s] instruction has become aligned with how students learn and engage with physics ideas.”

As another colleague stated, “[Dr. Singh’s] efforts are not driven by anything other than his compassion for the students he teaches. His appointment in FRIB is such that his evaluation is focused chiefly on the research he has done and the service he does for the lab; working to become an excellent instructor is something that he does because he cares about students’ experiences deeply.”

For his unwavering commitment to excellent and innovative science teaching, while continuing to conduct brilliant research, Dr. Jaideep Taggart Singh is greatly deserving of the Donald F. Koch Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award.