Huzefa Rangwala, faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the Volgenau School of Engineering was one of 17 faculty members who earned a University Teaching Excellence Award. He and his colleagues were honored at a Ceremony in the lobby of the Center of the Performing Arts on April 21, 2014.
Rangwala is an assistant professor of Computer Science at VSE. This honor acknowledges his commitment to providing students with meaningful, significant learning experiences. Since arriving at Mason in 2008, he has taught and developed a variety of graduate courses on data mining, computer architecture, and biological sequence analysis.
A rising star in his discipline, he won his department's Outstanding Teaching Award in 2012, is the principal investigator for Mason's NSF-funded Machine Learning in Biomedical Informatics (MLBio+) Laboratory. He also co-wrote an OSCAR-funded proposal to revise and integrate scholarship into the Computer Science undergraduate curriculum.
"Within the CS department, Huzefa has pioneered the use of active learning in the classroom," said Department Chair Sanjeev Setia. "Many of his colleagues (some of whom have been teaching for decades!) have been inspired by his example and have now started using active learning techniques in their classes."
Rangwala thinks the most effective class assignments supplement the understanding of the subject material. "Good assignments are meant to evoke questions that were not raised in class," he said. "I believe that a student's performance on assignments is a reflection of the instructor's teaching performance. I have always found that the ‘learning by doing' idea pays rich dividends in understanding important concepts or principles."
Mason's Teachers of Distinction are faculty members who were finalists for the Teaching Excellence Award and created noteworthy teaching portfolios that showcased their commitment to teaching and learning.