The 2008 Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award
for Excellence in Teaching: Giri Venkataramanan
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The spring 2007 section of the freshman course Introduction to Engineering (Inter Egr160) taught by Associate Professor
Giri Venkataramanan with the two wind turbines they built from scratch. The course combined learning with hands-on
experience, a hallmark of the teaching that earned Venkaramanan the 2008 Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award.
(View larger image)
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 ssociate Professor Giri Venkataramanan believes that learning involves doing. A hallmark of Venkataramanan’s classes is the balance of instructional material with practical application. Within his project-based pedagogy, his students gain hands-on experience building products from battery chargers to wind turbines. On evaluations, students describe his courses as “a pleasure,” “a class that really makes you think like an engineer,” and “the most practical, applicable course I’ve ever taken.”
For his outstanding educational efforts, Venkataramanan was presented with the 2008 Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award, an annual award honoring faculty who contribute to the instruction of engineering students at UW-Madison.
In addition to practical projects, he is known for his knowledgeable, fluent and engaging lectures—which he typically delivers without having to refer to notes, even in a 75-minute class. A colleague tasked with assessing Venkataramanan’s teaching said, “I was struck by his mastery of both the course content and the instructional materials.” Unimpressed with available textbooks, he prepares notes in the form of technical papers to compliment classroom lectures.
Students, on-campus and off, know that they always can find study help and sage advice from the man they call “Professor Giri.” He is remarkably invested in his students, quick to respond to E-mail queries and making himself available for one-on-one help to any student who seeks him out. He also makes a special effort to interact with distance-learning students, videotaping all his lectures for off-campus pupils.
However, Venkataramanan is not content to limit his teaching innovations to his own classroom. He is the chair of the ECE curriculum committee, was a member of the provost’s committee on evaluating and developing campus-wide guidelines for resources for teaching and learning excellence, and has given more than 40 presentations and workshops for interdisciplinary teaching.
While on sabbatical during the 2005-2006 school year, Venkataramanan participated in several wind-turbine-building projects in rural areas of three countries. His experiences inspired him to develop curriculum that would allow students to explore community-based sustainable energy solutions. In the spring of 2007, he taught a section of Introduction to Engineering (InterEgr 160) that focused on small-scale wind turbines. Students in the course not only learned about the engineering principles behind wind energy but also experienced building and installing wind turbines as a class project. Such coursework is the beginning of a movement toward a Certificate in Engineering for Energy Sustainability, an initiative that Venkataramanan spearheads.
“I think that these projects can be seen as a new application of the Wisconsin Idea to integrate research, teaching and outreach in energy conversion in a way that can attract and energize students to use engineering to change lives,” says a colleague. “That is, I think that Giri is opening up a new context for engineering education that realizes and renews the traditions of our university.”
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