Uddin Chosen for ASEE Glenn Murphy Award

5/7/2015 Susan Mumm, Editor

Written by Susan Mumm, Editor

Uddin Chosen for ASEE Glenn Murphy Award

 

Prof. Rizwan Uddin works with student Justin Joseph in the Virtual Education and Research Laboratory.
Prof. Rizwan Uddin works with student Justin Joseph in the Virtual Education and Research Laboratory.

Rizwan Uddin, professor of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering (NPRE) at Illinois, is the 2015 winner of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Glenn Murphy Award.

 

The national award honors Uddin for his strong and enduring commitment to advancing the quality and impact of education in nuclear engineering, and for his ability to fully engage students in learning through innovative teaching styles and techniques. 

“Rizwan has been at the heart of our teaching and academic activities for many years,” said NPRE Department Head Jim Stubbins, a 2010 winner of the Glenn Murphy Award. “He is often teaching multiple courses and is recognized as an excellent instructor by his students. Rizwan has offered distance instruction on an international level and has taken the lead in developing international courses in Italy and Jordan. He is highly deserving of this national recognition.”

An NPRE faculty member the past 19 years, Uddin has developed major, groundbreaking advances in highly visual interactive teaching environments. Having established NPRE’s Virtual Education and Research Laboratory, Uddin has led the effort to develop interactive teaching materials for laboratory and design courses using software and hardware approaches adapted from the video gaming universe.

He has developed an interactive nuclear radiation measurements laboratory environment that is completely virtual. In this learning environment, each student can conduct experiments individually, taking each step on his or her own, rather than as part of a laboratory team. Or, using the multi-player feature, the experiment can be conducted by a group of students. The innovation tremendously expands the potential for laboratory-based learning, particularly when coupled with increasingly limited access to real (physical) laboratory learning experiences.

 

Prof. Rizwan Uddin, right, in VERL.
Prof. Rizwan Uddin, right, in VERL.

The January 2013 issue of Nuclear News featured this highly impressive accomplishment on its cover, and it has attracted broad attention across several engineering disciplines.

 

Uddin also has developed other visual, interactive learning environments using 3-D interactive tools.

This approach allows students to interact directly with virtual representations of “solid” objects and systems where they could not go in reality. It allows students to dive down to atomic-level scales and back up to reactor-level control systems to understand the connection of length scales that would otherwise be impossible to imagine.

It further allows students to learn about best practices and safety and security-related issues without being at risk of physical danger. As an example, the 3-D interactive learning environment allows a student to “walk” into a (virtual) reactor containment area where there has been a radioactive materials spill. The student can learn to assess the levels of radiation exposure in an environment that could not be replicated in real life, and make timely decisions on how to handle the situation.

 

Prof. Rizwan Uddin and his research groups.
Prof. Rizwan Uddin and his research groups.

This technology compares with flight training simulators or reactor control room simulators, but in a realistic physical environment in which the student can “walk” around, make measurements, and decide on exposure levels and mitigating actions. Three students won the Best Undergraduate Poster award at the 2015 American Nuclear Society Student Conference for work carried out in Uddin’s lab.

 

Uddin’s efforts on behalf of his students extend from the laboratory to the classroom. He has shown impressive leadership in devising and implementing new teaching methods to engage students, including the “hybrid-flip teaching” approach.

Praising him highly for this innovative approach to learning, NPRE students have chosen Uddin for the annual departmental teaching award more than ten times over the last twenty years.

Uddin also has been a strong and effective mentor of graduate students. Working with them one-on-one, he has guided beginning graduate students to become first-class, independent researchers in the nuclear field.

Examples of his outstanding successes in mentoring are his string of PhD students who have won the American Nuclear Society (ANS) Mark Mills Award: Allen Toreja in 2003; Quan Zhou in 2005 and Prashant Jain in 2010. This award is presented to the graduate student author who submits the best original paper contributing to the advancement of science and engineering related to the atomic nucleus.

Uddin is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society and won that organization’s Mark Mills Award in 1987, and Young Member Engineering Achievement Award in 1999.
 


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This story was published May 7, 2015.