Two BU Faculty Will Be Honored for Outstanding Teaching Monday

Two BU Faculty Will Be Honored for Outstanding Teaching Monday

A true-crime murder mystery hadn't blipped on Elizabeth Co's radar as a helpful tool for teaching biology. The realization came serendipitously, after the Boston University faculty member adopted the software program ExamSoft to enable higher-quality anatomy images on tests. That straightforward start led to eye-catching innovation in her courses that changed BU and rippled out into the academic world.

"I was teaching an introductory biology class at the time" with ExamSoft, recalls Co, a senior lecturer in biology at the College of Arts & Sciences. Across several exams, the software revealed "the students did really well on memorization questions…but dramatically less well on critical thinking questions. It struck me that as a skill, critical thinking can't just be learned, it needs to be practiced." So she upped her use of case studies, starting with the 1982 cyanide-lacing of Tylenol capsules in Chicago. On the final exam that semester, students performance on critical thinking questions rivaled their impressive results with memorized material.

ExamSoft proved to have even more value when COVID struck. Co guided faculty colleagues in adopting the technology for giving students feedback during remote learning. Almost 10,000 Terriers use it today, and Co has given talks about the technology to national and international gatherings-which is among the reasons she has won the 2025 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. The recognition confers a $10,000 stipend to the faculty member who best exemplifies innovation in teaching by using technology.

Lei Tian won the simultaneously awarded Provost's Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award. The award recognizes Tian, a College of Engineering associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, as among the "outstanding scholars who excel as teachers inside and outside the classroom." It awards a $5,000 stipend. Both Tian and Co will be honored at a private dinner September 15.

"I view teaching as an extension of my scholarship, where students are not passive recipients of knowledge but active participants in the learning process," Tian says. "I aim to inspire students to become lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and innovators by developing curricula that reflect the latest scientific advancements and by employing strategies that emphasize clarity, accessibility, and relevance. I also encourage open dialogue and active participation to create a classroom where all students are engaged and supported."

Computational optical imaging exemplifies this philosophy. Instead of final exams last spring, he assigned class projects about real-world problems. One dealt with monocular depth estimation-"a technique used to estimate 3D structure from a single photograph, something especially useful in robotics vision and self-driving cars," he says. "Students begin by reviewing a recent research paper I curated on the topic. They then explore the simplified math and optics behind how a camera captures depth cues," working in teams to explain the concepts to the class and "implement a cutting-edge algorithm that tries to recover depth information from a single image."

Among his research grants, Tian has received a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative award for an imaging platform, still in development, "for visualizing dynamic biological processes" with unprecedented resolution, he says. The research, if successful, "holds promise for enabling new treatments and identifying novel drug targets."

Student evaluators raved about both award winners. "Dr. Co is what all other professors should strive to be," one wrote. "Her class is challenging, but so rewarding in the end because she teaches her students to think critically and reason their way through every question and case study."

One of Tian's students lauded "his dedication to ensuring each student grasps the material… His approachability fosters an environment where questions are encouraged and learning flourishes."

Co says that "practice makes improvement" sums up her teaching philosophy. "While there is no getting around a degree of memorization, our students benefit much more from working on how they use the information available to them. In the beginning of my teaching career, I thought I could just show students how to think critically and then ask them to do it, and the data I gathered on the outcomes in my classrooms indicated that it didn't work to teach that way."

She offers a sports analogy: "Even if you're a fantastic pitcher, you need to keep practicing."

Both winners were selected by the Provost's Office.

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