Two CICS Faculty Members Receive Teaching Awards

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Two faculty members in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) recently received awards for their outstanding teaching.

Charles “Chip” Weems, associate professor, was awarded the 2018-19 Distinguished Teaching Award by the University of Massachusetts Amherst for excellence in classroom teaching. This award is distributed annually following a competitive campus-wide nomination and selection process.

Weems teaches courses centered around computer architecture within the college, and has co-authored 28 introductory computer science texts, which have been used by more than a million students in learning how to program. He also helps lead a project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop pioneering teaching methods to transform computer science education.

Marc Liberatore, teaching faculty and the associate director of the Digital Forensics Lab, was selected to receive the college's 2019 College Outstanding Teaching Award.

This award is granted annually to one faculty member who demonstrates a positive impact on their students, excellence and creativity in teaching and a mastery of their subject.

Since 2011, Liberatore has taught courses at UMass in cybersecurity, digital forensics, networking, and data structures. In addition to his work in the classroom, he also advises first and second-year students in the computer science undergraduate degree program. He previously served as a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University.