Elisabeth Brown, teaching assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, and Emily Hector, assistant professor in the Department of Statistics, have been honored by the College of Sciences with the 2023-24 LeRoy and Elva Martin Award for Teaching Excellence.
The Martin Award recognizes professors’ outstanding contributions to the College of Sciences’ teaching mission. The award was created in 2001 by the late LeRoy Martin Jr., a longtime mathematics professor at NC State, to honor his parents, Elva and LeRoy Martin.
Edited excerpts from their nominations are below.
Elisabeth Brown joined the NC State faculty in 2017. Since then, she has earned a reputation among peers and students as an engaging and enthusiastic instructor who puts a great deal of effort, creativity and care into her classes. She is thoughtful about teaching at the right level to which the students with different mathematics backgrounds can relate and comprehend the content. She is also actively involved in revising current course offerings and developing new courses to strengthen undergraduate and graduate curricula, including creating prerequisite tutorial materials and video lectures.
Emily Hector joined the NC State faculty in 2020. In her classes, she employs a “fill-in-the-blank” teaching technique by providing incomplete lecture notes that are then filled in during the lecture. This allows students to actively engage in learning during worked examples but also permits them to listen without distraction. Hector is sensitive to student engagement, and has developed a weekly supplementary set of worked problems for students to attempt independently in a low-stakes ungraded environment. In addition, her applications-focused research interests are accessible to students, which allows her to engage them and generate excitement about statistics.
