Seema Irani and Henry Pan Named TAs of the Year
Seema Irani and Henry Pan have been named the TAs of the Year for their work in ChE 264 Chemical Engineering Process and Projects Laboratory and ChE 253M Measurement, Control and Data Analysis Lab, respectively.
Seema and Henry will each be awarded the Paige H. and J. Jeff Weidner Endowed Presidential Fellowship in Chemical Engineering, worth $3,500.
In the evaluation of Seema’s performance, the students described her as very helpful, nice and passionate about helping students.
ChE 264 professor, Dr. Gary Rochelle, says, “Seema was an exemplary TA who provided our students with a quality one-on-one teaching experience. She listened, interacted and gave effective feedback and evaluation.”
“I am honored and delighted to receive this award and am very grateful to Dr. Rochelle for giving me the opportunity to be a TA for this course and the guidance he provided me throughout,” Seema says. “I really enjoy formulating new ways to convey my understanding of a concept to students and interacting with them always makes it a two-way learning experience. The students were excited and enthusiastic about the experiments they had to perform and that motivates me as a TA.”
Henry’s students described him as patient, always ready to help and reliable for quickly answering questions both in class and after hours.
“Henry was well prepared for experiments, worked well with the students, kept them organized while giving them the latitude to figure things out in the lab and provided clear, helpful and timely feedback on lab reports,” Dr. Keith Friedman, ChE 253M course instructor, says. “Henry’s extra efforts ensured that the students learned efficiently in complicated experiments.”
“During my academic career, I have had the fortune to learn from professors that genuinely cared about their students’ success and mastery of the material. Learning from their example, I always strive to foster a constructive learning environment so that the students can explore and develop a deeper understanding of the concepts at hand,” Pan says. “For most of the students, it was their first hands-on chemical engineering course and it was my first time teaching a lab course. It was a great learning process for everyone involved.”
The department is pleased to recognize the level of effort given and performance above and beyond expectations by these two exceptional TAs.