Riccio College of Engineering Names MIE’s Meghan Huber and CEE’s Nicholas Tooker as Winners of Its Outstanding Teaching Award

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The Riccio College of Engineering (CoE) has selected Assistant Professor Meghan Huber of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and Professor of Practice Nicholas Tooker of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department as the recipients of its prestigious 2026 College Outstanding Teaching Award (COTA). Huber is also an adjunct in the Biomedical Engineering Department, while Tooker is additionally a Senior Lecturer and an Integrated Concentration in STEM Teaching Fellow.

The COTA award recognizes excellence in teaching and rewards individual faculty members at each of the university’s colleges for their instructional accomplishments. UMass Amherst instituted the COTA as a complement to its campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. The COTA program is administered by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the individual colleges, and the award includes a $1,000 prize and commemorative plaque. 

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As MIE Department Head Jonathan Rothstein summarizes Huber’s teaching expertise, “In all her efforts, Professor Huber has proven herself to be one of the best teachers on campus, as evidenced by students’ comments about her courses, her mastery of the subject matter, her role as a passionate teacher and mentor in their professional lives, and her pioneering contributions to the teaching mission of the department, college, and university, especially in establishing a cutting-edge robotics-education program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.” 

Huber’s courses – including MIE 124: Computational Approaches to Engineering Problems, MIE 310: Dynamics, MIE 615: Robotics, and MIE 697RS: BioRobotics – emphasize fundamental skills while encouraging critical thinking and creativity. 

As one example of Huber’s teaching and mentoring skills, MIE honored her with its student-voted 2024 UMass Mechanical Engineering Advisor of the Year award. She has supervised students in 10 graduate independent studies, 10 undergraduate honors theses, and 16 undergraduate independent studies, with most of these students actively participating in her research lab. In addition, Huber has developed more than 40 freely accessible, pre-recorded lecture videos to further enhance student engagement and interactive-class sessions.

“As a leading researcher in robotics, human-robot interaction, and neuromotor control, Dr. Huber seamlessly integrates cutting-edge research into her teaching,” comments MIE Professor Frank Sup. “She provides students opportunities to engage with state-of-the-art advancements, ensuring they grasp and apply theoretical concepts to real-world challenges. Her expertise is reflected in her high-impact publications, leadership roles in major robotics conferences, and successful research grants, including the prestigious NSF [National Science Foundation] CAREER Award and NIH [National Institutes of Health] Trailblazer Award.”

As one student remarks, “Professor Huber was possibly one of the best professors in my college journey thus far. Her teaching style is clear, engaging, and incredibly supportive.” Another student says that Huber is a “great overall person, great teacher, and a fantastic engineering role model!” And a third notes simply that “Meghan Huber is the nicest professor I have ever had!”

Rothstein adds that “A strong testament to Professor Huber’s dedication to teaching and mentoring is her involvement as the faculty advisor to the campus-wide Robotics Team,” which she helped to found. “Teaching such a real-world, design-project-oriented [endeavor] requires significant time, effort, and commitment.”

Tooker’s teaching credentials are comparable to Huber’s. As CEE Department Head Sergio Breña summarizes Tooker’s contributions to the CoE’s engineering education, “Dr. Tooker combines his academic and professional experience and his interpersonal communication skills to provide excellent classroom and one-on-one learning experiences for students. He goes far beyond typical efforts to provide extraordinary opportunities for students to have especially relevant experiences outside the classroom to enhance their learning.” 

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According to CEE Associate Professor Kara Peterman, “Nick has taught an incredible number of courses across our curriculum, ranging from 100- to 700-level, large undergraduate to small graduate, laboratory to lecture. This demonstrates his breadth as an educator and his skills in connecting students to a wide range of material. Nick was essential in transforming CEE 470 GIS into a design course, increasing the engineering rigor of the course to make it more practically oriented for our students’ future careers.”

Another example of Tooker’s teaching dedication is that in 2022-2023 he and CEE Associate Professor Eric Gonzales secured a UMass Flex Learning Grant to overhaul the technology in one CEE instruction space and enable online and hybrid delivery of courses in the department. 

For his efforts, Tooker received a 2024-2025 Lilly Teaching Fellowship from the UMass CTL and was nominated by his students for a 2022 University Distinguished Teaching Award.

Breña explains that “Dr. Tooker has provided important mentoring to students and service to CEE and the Riccio CoE by being actively involved with the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Kenya project group. His work with this group has provided invaluable practical experience for our students and has also fostered meaningful collaborations with communities in Kenya, including connections with the University of Nairobi’s EWB group.”

In that context, as CoE Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs Caitlyn Butler points out, “This semester (Spring 2026), Nick is on a Fulbright Fellowship to Kenya. For his Fulbright Fellowship, Nick will teach courses in water and wastewater treatment at the University of Nairobi. Dr. Tooker also intends to develop a course on water- and wastewater-treatment design that will be offered as a study-abroad opportunity to UMass students during future winter terms.” (April 2026)