Center for Teaching and Learning Selects MIE’s Meghan Huber as Lilly Teaching Fellow

Content

The UMass Amherst Center for Teaching & Learning has chosen Meghan Huber – an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and an adjunct in Biomedical Engineering and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences – as one of the 2025-26 Lilly Fellows for Teaching Excellence. As Huber explains, “Participation in the Lilly Fellowship Program will help me redesign a critical undergraduate programming course that serves as a fundamental building block for robotics and, more broadly, engineering education.” 

Winning a Lilly Fellowship “is a significant achievement given the highly competitive nature of this teaching leadership opportunity,” as the Lilly Program website notes. 

Participation involves work over the summer, nine cohort meetings and assignments during the academic year, a new course design (or significant redesign of an existing course), and sharing the accrued knowledge after the fellowship. 

Huber adds that the Lilly Program “will equip me with the tools and insights necessary to develop and implement a comprehensive robotics education program, bringing the long-term vision of the UMass Amherst Robotics faculty to fruition.”

As director of the Human Robot Systems Lab, Huber focuses on understanding how humans and robots can learn from the physical interactions with the world around them and with one another. With her Lilly Fellowship, Huber plans to redesign MIE124 Intro to Programming to serve more effectively as a basic component for the robotics curriculum and engineering in general. 

As Huber explains, “I’ve observed that many students come to my classes still feeling uncomfortable with programming, despite having taken this course. Given that our college – and the broader engineering field – is increasingly integrating artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics into the curriculum, it’s more important than ever that students have a strong foundation in programming.”

Huber says that her goals for redesigning this course are: to build students’ confidence in programming by ensuring they feel comfortable applying their knowledge; to create a course that is intellectually stimulating for learners at all levels by encouraging engagement and deep understanding of programming concepts; and to inspire curiosity by demonstrating the exciting opportunities that programming skills afford in all areas of engineering.

Established in 1986, the Lilly Fellowship supports the university's strategic interest in developing academic leaders in the area of teaching. Past Lilly Fellows include 33 UMass Distinguished Teaching Award winners, 48 college Outstanding Teaching Award winners, two Manning Award winners, 44 department chairs, 21 associate deans, and two deans. (May 2025)