Faculty Profiles

Berkeley Faculty Win Top Teaching Honor

Only five percent of those who have taught on campus since 1959 — the year the awards began — have received the Distinguished Teaching Award. This year’s recipients bring the total to 219.

By Media Relations

And the winners are: Top, David Wagner, computer science; bottom left, Ani Adhikari, statistics; bottom right, Ananya Roy, city and regional planning. (Peg Skorpinski photo)

Summer 2006 | Two assistant professors and a lecturer at Berkeley are recipients of the campus’s prestigious 2006 Distinguished Teaching Award. The award, bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching, is Berkeley’s highest honor for instruction.

Ani Adhikari, lecturer, statistics
A bit of theatrics, a few jokes, perhaps some confrontation, and intimate engagement with students is Ani Adhikari’s key to enlivening the dry subject of statistics.

“Students like a sharp-tongued professor, if the sharp tongue is not directed toward them,” said Adhikari, a native of Calcutta, India, who has lectured in the statistics department for nearly 10 years. “I really wish I could be Professor Snape from Harry Potter.”

Eschewing electronic media like Powerpoint, Adhikari writes and sketches on the blackboard and draws students into statistical problems with drama and a bit of suspense, even in the 250-student “Introduction to Statistics,” or “Stat 2,” classes. But she is uncompromising about honesty. “Even at the highest levels, people tend to dazzle you with not very well-founded statistical arguments,” she said. “I do not allow any student to hide behind jargon or calculations or formulas.”

“Adhikari’s teaching methods are a tradition that should be passed down,” said one of her former students, Sadhana Nathan. “I decided to sit in on her ‘Statistics 2’ lectures last fall because I had learned so much in her class, and I wanted to pass on her teaching techniques to the high schoolers that I was working with in the statistics classes at Berkeley High.”

Adhikari almost didn’t make it to UC Berkeley. Turned down by the Graduate Division because she attended a three-year program at the Indian Statistical Institute, she was surprised to receive a cable from one of the legends of statistics, the late Berkeley professor Lucien Le Cam: “Please disregard Graduate Division letter. Department recommends highly.”

After obtaining her Ph.D. in 1986 and teaching at Stanford, she returned to teach at Berkeley in 1996.

“I am having a ball returning what was given to me,” she said. “It keeps me young.”

Ananya Roy, assistant professor, city and regional planning
A letter from Robert Cervero and Martin Wachs, departmental chair and professor emeritus, respectively, nominating Ananya Roy for a Distinguished Teaching Award lauded Roy as “one of the most gifted teachers in the 57-year history of the Department of City and Regional Planning.”

Roy, whose current research examines the policies governing public health and poverty on a global level, said her teaching is guided by three principles.

“First,” she said, “I seek to globalize the curriculum of urban studies and planning, educating students about the great cities that lie outside the domain of their Euro-American experiences: Calcutta, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Manila, Nairobi.

“I want my students to rethink their preconceived atlases: not to just fit these urbanisms into what they already know, but rather to craft entirely new paradigms of urban order and function. And more boldly, I want them to call into question the geopolitical hierarchies, such as First World and Third World, through which we have ordered the world.”

A native of Calcutta, Roy earned her B.A. in comparative urban studies from Mills College in Oakland and received an M.C.P. and Ph.D. in city and regional planning from Berkeley. She taught in the sociology department at Mills in 1996 and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1999.

Roy also is chair of her department’s undergraduate urban studies major, associate dean of academic affairs for International and Area Studies, and faculty director of Berkeley Programs for Study Abroad.

She said teaching requires more than being in the classroom and serving as an adviser and mentor — it also includes taking on institutional roles and administrative duties.

“There is a lot of work to be done to preserve this beautiful but fragile ideal called a public university, to ensure excellence and inclusion in public education,” Roy said.

David Wagner, assistant professor, computer science
When students in David Wagner’s class give him a hard time about something he just said or leave class debating a point in his lecture, he knows he’s succeeded as a teacher.

“My ideal classroom scenario is one where students are active learners forming their own conclusions,” said Wagner. “I try to get students engaged in debating the material or puzzling through it themselves.”

The decision to go into a field of work that required teaching was not an easy one for him. While working toward an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton and a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley, he had little teaching experience and lots of trepidation about gaining it. But after joining the Berkeley faculty in 2000, he knew he’d made the right choice. “Not only did I like the teaching, I loved it,” he said.

Wagner draws on his own experiences to get his points across to students, said Karl Chen, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Berkeley who took two classes from Wagner as an undergraduate. “His lectures are very interactive,” said Chen. “He relates to students by talking about his past experiences, so his lectures feel like a story that’s unfolding.”

The first time Wagner taught CS 70, “Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science,” Chen was in the classroom. “It was the single best undergraduate course I took,” he said. “This course fueled my love for computer science.”

Wagner is recognized as one of the world’s leading cryptographers and experts in computer security. In 2002, the magazine “Popular Science” named him one of their “Brilliant 10.” In a letter recommending Wagner for the teaching award, Richard M. Karp, University Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, said that Wagner’s stature as a researcher informs his teaching.

“He has invented most of the main techniques for the analysis of cryptographic protocols, won early fame for his exploits in breaking cryptographic systems, and has contributed greatly to providing a rigorous foundation for the field of software security,” Karp wrote.