CoE Selects ChE’s Lauren Andrews and MIE’s Jim Lagrant for the College’s 2024-2025 Outstanding Teaching Award
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The College of Engineering (CoE) has chosen Assistant Professor Lauren Andrews of the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department and Senior Lecturer and Professor of Practice in Manufacturing Jim Lagrant of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department as the 2024-2025 College Outstanding Teaching Award (COTA) winners. The COTA for each college at UMass Amherst was instituted as a complement to the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. The COTA program is administered by the Center for Teaching and Learning and the individual colleges.
The consummate teaching performance of Andrews was epitomized when she received ChE’s inaugural Jeffrey M. Davis Award for Excellence in Teaching in May of 2024. According to ChE Department Head Dimitrios Maroudas, “Dr. Andrews has become one of the pillars of our department in our teaching and research mission. She is a gifted and dedicated teacher and mentor, an emerging research leader in the field of synthetic biology and biological engineering, and a most valued colleague whose institutional and professional service has been exemplary.”
In addition to her exceptional teaching in the ChE department, as cited by outstanding student-evaluations, Andrews has participated in three National Engineering Teaching Institute workshops offered by the American Society of Engineering Education and has been invited three times to create content and co-teach the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Synthetic Biology Course.
Maroudas says that Andrews “has accumulated an impressive teaching and research skillset and epitomizes the modern teacher-scholar.” For example, Andrews is the Marvin and Eva Schlanger Faculty Fellow in Chemical Engineering (since 2018) and an affiliated faculty member in the Graduate Biotechnology Training Program, the Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program, and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences.
According to MIE Department Head Sundar Krishnamurty, “Lagrant is an exemplary teacher and mentor with an unparalleled enthusiasm to motivate students through his passion and energy for teaching and mentoring.” His teaching ability was further recognized when he received the Mechanical Engineering Faculty of the Year Award in 2024. As part of his teaching philosophy, Lagrant makes connections between theory and practice, often drawing on his two decades of industry experience prior to joining the UMass faculty. One recent example was when he redesigned MIE's Manufacturing Processes course to supplant traditional lectures with experiential learning.
In addition to leading the MIE undergraduate capstone design course, Lagrant's teaching covers manufacturing related courses with a focus on automation technology, industry 4.0, and experiential engineering education. He serves as director of the M.S. in Manufacturing Engineering program, and he founded the Manufacturing Automation Teaching Lab, which utilizes industrial hardware and software for use in undergraduate and graduate courses.
As CoE Dean Sanjay Raman says about this year’s COTA winners, “Within the College of Engineering, we are deeply fortunate to have so many skilled and dedicated faculty members who inspire their students and their colleagues to excellence. Please join me in congratulating Lauren Andrews and Jim Lagrant.”