Meet Recent Moruzzi Award Winners
Shichao Liu
Shichao Liu - Civil, Environmental, & Architectural Engineering
As a trained engineer with a strong commitment to student learning, Professor Shichao Liu transformed the undergraduate classroom through innovative technology and pedagogy that cultivates and harnesses visual communication to foster student learning. Collectively, Professor Liu’s innovations help students develop a fundamental skill while, at the same time, utilizes technology that helps students bridge critical gaps to communicate their ideas and reason with visual information, all while developing these important skill sets.
John-Michael Davis
John-Michael Davis - The Global School
As Director of the Puerto Rico project center (PRPC), John-Michael Davis has worked to deepen student learning before, during, and after their IQP experience through a series of curricular innovations that links the projects students work on during IQP to a larger body of community-engaged research and scholarship and also to redesign the Puerto Rico project center so that both students and the communities they work in experience deepened benefits.
Laura Roberts, Integrative and Global Studies
Professor Laura Roberts’ work over the last 2 years to harness and leverage the use of emerging generative AI for the classroom has helped lead us toward more thoughtful and innovative use of a technology that many of us are hesitant to embrace. Her “work has helped to elevate the debate about how to train students to critically assess generative AI tools” so they will be able employ them legitimately and constructively while understanding their limits.
Stacey Shaw, Social Science & Policy Studies
As a scholar on deliberate rest, Professor Stacy Shaw has advanced deliberate rest as a transformative pedagogical technique and a vehicle to address student health and wellbeing. To this end, Professor Shaw coaches students in designing deliberate rest periods. This innovative approach improves students’ mental health and wellbeing while equipping them with additional tools to navigate stress.
Rose Bohrer, Computer Science
In an amazing redesign of an undergraduate programming language course, Professor Bohrer has integrated theory-driven content with human-oriented concerns, social and ethical considerations, and belonging in computing. A suitable text did not exist, so Rose created an open-access textbook, a work rich in research and her conceptualization of the field. Her teaching approach has already been shared in several conference publications, and in two short years, she has already changed Computer Science at WPI for the better.
Joseph Aguilar and Kate McIntyre, Humanities and Arts
Professors Aguilar and McIntyre launched an international literary magazine, Hex Literary, which has made creative writing at WPI a thriving enterprise. The day-to-day business of running the journal is done largely by students, who learn about the history of literary journals, how to promote content through social media and other campaigns, evaluate literary submissions, plan events, and conduct interviews with writers. The work Joe and Kate have done to build the journal, their pedagogy, and outcomes for students are examples of the best things project-based learning can achieve.
Lindsay Davis - Humanities & Arts
With the goal of shifting STEM cultures away from exclusion and toward diversity and inclusion, Professor Lindsay Davis and Professor Rebecca Moody of the Humanities and Arts Department co-founded and co-direct a program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) at WPI. Using existing but previously disconnected classes in Humanities and Arts and Social Sciences as well as new courses, they created a GSWS minor and a community in which WPI students can explore the socio-political issues of gender, sexuality, and identity.